I have long been interested in Bermuda. Like the island that I studied for my PhD thesis, Mauritius, it has no indigenous population. It was settled during the age of European expansion, and developed using indentured servants from Europe and African slaves. In Mauritius the call for a new form of unfree labour in the aftermath of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and gradual emancipation during the 1830s, was met by the importation of some half a million indentured labourers from India and China. In contrast, Portuguese indentured workers (some from African islands like Madeira) migrated to Bermuda during the same period. Factoring in the historic mobility between Bermuda, North America (including Halifax in Canada), and the Caribbean, Bermuda has a distinct population base and the associated forms of creolised culture that we see in places like Mauritius today. Descendants of Europeans, Africans and Portuguese all live in the islands now. But the islands are decidedly not post-colonial. Along with thirteen other former colonies, they are a British Overseas Territory. The Queeen’s head appears on the Bermudian dollar, and on postage stamps, and islanders travel on British passports. There are distinctly ‘British’ touches all over the island; bright red postboxes, zebra crossings, and cafes serving afternoon tea.
The Dockyard, Bermuda. Photograph by the author (2014).
So where does the Carceral Archipelago project fit in all this? The answer is that I chose Bermuda as one of my project case studies because it is often mentioned, but rarely incorporated properly, into British histories of criminal justice. It received around 9,000 British and Irish convicts during the period 1823-63, in a system managed by the Home Office. The convicts were mainly kept on board prison hulks, most moored off the naval dockyard and for a brief period the town of St Georges. They undertook massive publics works, most notably the building of the dockyard, which was partly directed by the Admiralty. I am keen to understand the relationship of the Bermuda hulks to the larger history of prisoner incarceration, convict transportation, and labour exploitation. I want to trace in detail some of their connections to other penal sites, notably Spike Island prison in Ireland, Portland Prison on the Isle of Wight (the first juvenile reformatory in Britain), and Upper Canada, the Cape Colony and Western Australia. My goal is to draw the attention of British historians to the huge importance of Empire in their understandings of the history of punishment at home; and using some of the tools of New Imperial History and historical geography, to articulate the importance of metropolitan/ imperial and colony/ colonial connections and networks in understanding both the flow of convicts and ideas about punishment.
“Prisoners In Paradise” Exhibition Plate, National Museum of Bermuda. Photograph by the author (2014).
A further aim is to think about the legacies of a system that, unlike the penal colonies of Australia and the Andaman Islands, was completely homosocial (only men were sent.) Neither convict ticket of leave holders (under probation) nor ex-convicts were granted the right of settlement in the islands, and those still under sentence were taken away when the system wound up. Thus there is no convict-descended population or community in Bermuda today. How, in this context, I am asking, is the role that convicts played in land clearance, quarrying, public works, and fortification understood and represented in the islands’ various museums and historic sites?
Convict hulk, Bermuda. Image: www.bermuda-online.org
On my first visit to Dockyard, I had already completed a substantial body of research on the hulks in the National Archives. It holds a rich collection of Bermuda papers, in the CO37 series. Readers interested in this collection might be interested to know that a few years ago, Dr Kristy Warren (now a research associate on the Legacies of British Slave Ownership project at UCL) produced a digitized catalogue of this collection, item by item, including governor’s despatches, and “offices and individuals” records. This means that it is exceptionally easy for archive users to find the precise location of items of likely interest, by keying in search times and date ranges, confined to the CO37 series. Given the volume of petitions sent from Britain on behalf of convicts on the hulks, this catalogue also has massive potential for family historians looking for their ancestors’ traces in the archives. For my part, I have been reading papers on a diversity of topics relevant to the overall aims of the Carceral Archipelago project, including on work, punishment, resistance and agency, and sex and sexuality.
When the ferryboat from the Bermudian capital of Hamilton pulled up at the dockyard jetty I was immediately struck by the dockyard’s scale – its massive scale. More than this, I realized that I had not previously appreciated the vastness of the expanse of hard limestone rock, to be cut, sawn and moved by convicts. It is difficult to properly understand this from textual descriptions of ‘convict quarrying’. It is easier to see what quarrying meant to each individual convict when one walks through deep cut paths, bordered by tall smooth sides of hard rock, from seeing the size of the long two-man limestone saws hanging in the museum, and from walking through convict-built structures, made of huge lumps of rock and mortar. No wonder, as curatorial researcher Dr Debbie Atwood told me, many convicts succumbed to what was called “limestone blindness.” The spatiality of the site is also best appreciated on the ground. Bermuda is shaped like the letter “J,” lying on its side, with Dockyard at the top of the curve. St Georges is right at the opposite end; closer by sea than overland. Convicts could be taken off hulks for labour daily; with relatively little mixing with the enslaved and later apprenticed and emancipated island population. It was only after 1852 that some were moved to onshore barracks at Boaz Island.
Limestone saws hanging above a fireplace, The Commissioner’s House, Dockyard, Bermuda. Photograph by the author (2014).
The other point of interest that emerged from my site visit is a striking sense of the changing landscape of Dockyard’s penal functions. Casemates is on the same site. Initially a military barracks, in 1960, almost a century after the convicts left, it was opened as a prison for locally convicted, Bermudian prisoners. The islands’ only maximum security prison lies just beneath Casemates, surrounded by the usual incarceratory paraphernalia of barbed wire and CCTV. And so we see the principles of overlap and succession of confinement on the same site, a principle which is holding firm across most of the Carceral Archipelago case studies. The social transformation of features of the “natural” landscape – isolation, elevation, deep harbours, choppy waters – into barriers of containment (however leaky they could be) do not lose their appeal as the years pass. Moreover, the stigma of criminality (or contagion) can render such locations and their immediate surrounds undesirable places of free settlement, propelling the perpetuation of their use as incarceratory sites.
Casemates Prison (on the hill), with barbed wire visible to the left (modern prison obscured from view), Dockyard. Photograph by the author (2014).
And this brings me to my final point. When the old Casemates prison opens to the public in a few years time, transformed into a museum and lecture hall, amongst other things, it will join the many shops, cafes, pubs and restaurants that have turned the Dockyard into Bermuda’s most visited tourist attraction. For these days, enormous cruise ships – vast floating hotels – have replaced the hulks. The global origins and circular mobility of the people who staff them, mainly for wealthy tourists from the USA, perhaps brings a new form of labour migration to Bermuda. But that, perhaps, is a subject for another blog.
Cruise ships at Dockyard. Photograph by the author (2014).
The author would like to record her thanks to Dr Ed Harris, Dr Debbie Atwood and Dr Elena Strong, at the National Museum of Bermuda, and Dr Karla Ingermann at the National Archives of Bermuda.
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Do you have any evidence of penal colonies, and in particular, prison hulks, in the Cape Colony?
Not prison hulks. The best relevant account of the Cape is by AF Hattersley, Convict Crisis and the Growth of Unity (1965).
A good friend is an expert on convict hulks in Bermuda…
One of this articles.
Google “Chris Addams”
http://www.numismatics.org.au/pdfjournal/Vol18/Vol%2018%20Article%201.pdf
Thanks. I met Chris once, many years ago. I saw the exhibition of the artefacts in Sydney a couple of years ago, too!
Thanks for the interesting article.
The medical records of the patients in the Bermuda Royal Naval Hospital 1824-1848 from National Archives have been scanned and are available and searchable on Ancestry (by name and year only). Almost all the records concern ill convicts. (Paradoxically the records are under Tax Criminal Land and Wills / UK Royal Naval Medical Journals, 1817-1857. Search under ‘B’ and Bermuda Royal Naval Hospital rather than the name of the hulk). For instance there was a nasty epidemic of Yellow Fever in October 1837 with a very high mortality rate. For each patient there is his name, age, hulk (if appropriate), diagnosis and outcome as well as extensive clinical information.
Thank you very much for this really useful post. This is a wonderful resource for historians of Bermuda and the hulks, as well as in the medical humanities.
Thank you for this post, Peter. After several years of knowing that two of my distant uncles were transported for 14 years I am finally finding information about them in Bermuda. I was able to find their medical records thanks to your suggestion. I appreciate it very much!
Thanks for your article and guidance into Bermuda research by your contributors.
The convict ship Merchantman called to Bermuda 10 Oct 1862 to pick up 192 convicts to be transferred to Swan River Colony Western Australia.
Names of convicts, sentence place and date including a number of court martial’s from Bermuda can be found on Ancestry under Australian Convict Transfer Registers 1791 – 1868, slides 240 to 251.
More information on the voyage can be found on the perthdps website Convicts to Australia and search for the ship Merchantman.
Another incredible online resource for researchers of Bermuda, the hulks, and convict transportation to Western Australia. Thank you!
[…] is a bit too shady for me to dig into this for a long time), so here is one key paragraph from a blog that introduces you to how the current Bermuda population came to […]
[…] of penal colonies in demography and heritage – the latter being the subject of previous blogs by myself (Bermuda), and Katy Roscoe and Eureka Henrich […]
[…] unable to tell fascinating stories such as the one we can read in previous posts in this blog – Bermuda and Cape Town, Eureka Henrich on Sydney and Katherine Roscoe on Rottnest Island. However, I […]
Hello I am researching a female who was transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1846. She said her husband was transported to Bermuda on the “Scotia” where can I find more details of this please?
Thank you for your very interesting article as the above was the first time I’ve come across Bermuda as a place for transportation.
Dear Barbara, the Scotia went to Bermuda in 1846. I know this from the colonial office archives in London. I understand that all the convict hulk records are now available on findmypast – that might be a good first port of call? Good luck! Clare
Thank you Clare, indeed they are on Find My Past. I’ve long had an interest in crime and punishment and find it fascinating to look at records. I have an appointment in a few weeks with a doctor at the archives at Lancaster Castle.
Thank you for the information on the Scotia. So the ships would sail from England then lay in the harbour with the men living on board, just going off to do their labours. How and when did they make it back to England? Transportation really is an interesting subject which I’ve only been researching a short while but my eyes have sure been opened!
Thank you for the most useful background to help fill in my understanding of my great grandfather’s time 1840-1850 incarcerated on Bermuda.
Max Double
I am glad that you enjoyed the blog, Max. Good luck with your research!
Yes that’s right, Barbara, the men (until the very end of the period) lived on board the ships (hulks), mainly near The Dockyard. You can visit the site today where there is a terrific museum. Some returned to England or Ireland at the end of their sentence, some went on to Western Australia (on tickets-of-leave). None settled in Bermuda. I am glad you enjoyed the post, and good luck with your research!
Thank you for an excellent site. I am an historian of criminal justice history in Canada. Transportation plays only a small role in that history, but it was used in the 1820s and 1830s for people sentenced to death and pardoned, as a condition of pardon, and the convict destination was Bermuda. The British government stopped the practice in 1835. Is there a set of records devoted specifically to transportation from British North America to Bermuda? From what I’ve been able to gather so far the convicts were shipped from Halifax, Nova Scotia, in naval vessels (Halifax was the principal naval base on the North American east coast). Convicts convicted in Nova Scotia went to Bermuda, and so did a few convicted in Lower Canada (now Quebec). I haven’t found any evidence yet of convicts from Upper Canada or New Brunswick going to Bermuda.
Jim Phillips
Dear Jim. Thanks. Bermuda is one of the project case studies, and in the more detailed data (that we will release at the end of the project) the Canadians are ‘counted’ in the flows. 8 were sent from Canada 1838 and 23 from Nova Scotia in 1848. The 8 Canadian convicts landed in 1838 were pardoned immediately on arrival. There is some information about them in the Colonial Office records in The National Archives at Kew. Best wishes, Clare
[…] off Bermuda’s dockyard basin [2]. As documented in Clare Anderson’s previous blog post, The Convict Hulks of Bermuda, prisoners levelled the land, constructed roads and carried out major restructuring of the […]
Hi Clare, my gr gr grandfather was convicted in Ireland in January 1847 and sentenced to 10 years transportation. He was sent to Bermuda on board the “Bangalore”. In April 1849 he was put on board the “Neptune” ( along with hundreds of other Irish convicts) and sent to Cape of Good Hope to finish his sentence. The Cape, however, would not accept the convicts, and after many months at anchor in the harbour there, the “Neptune” was sent to Tasmania, where all the convicts were given a Conditional Pardon. The arrived in Hobart April 1850. They spent 12 months on board the “Neptune”. The Home Office in London decided they did not have to complete their original sentences.
Great site for info on Bermuda.
Thanks for your comment. The Neptune story is so interesting. I believe John Mitchell was also on board. I am pleased that you have been able to piece together this part of your family history. Best wishes, Clare
Hi my ancestor Manuel Jacinto apparently from the Azores then a prisoner a Trinidad was a convict on the Coriomandel ship transporterd to Hobart Australia in 1838. I notice you mentioned limestone blindness. Interestingly a discription from the ships Records of him said he had something wrong with his eyes. He married my great great great grandmother but sadly drowned in Sydney NSW Australia maybe his poor eyes contributed to him drowning.
Dear Jeannette, how interesting! Indeed, across many contexts there are reports that convicts suffered poor eyesight. Perhaps a medical historian could illuminate its connection with working with limestone. I wonder how Manuel Jacinto ended up in Australia. That is fascinating. Thanks for writing, and good luck with your research. All best, Clare.
Hi Clare
My ancestor Henry Harris was convicted and sent to Bermuda on the Hulks. He was a second offender years later and then sent to Australia where I come in. Can you advise how I can find out which hulk he was on or what records to search, thank you
Dear Julie, I understand that Find My Past has digitised the convict hulk records. The originals are in The National Archives, Kew. I hope that helps. Good luck with your work! Clare
Dear Clare
Has there been a study of convicts sent to NSW who had been previously transported to Bermuda?
Christine
Dear Christine, As far as I am aware, Bermuda convicts were only transferred to VDL/ WA (see below). I don’t know whether any convicts who went back to GB after serving their sentences in Bermuda were reconvicted and (re)transported to NSW. Best wishes, Clare
Bermuda transfers:
1848 203 VDL
1849 289 Cape Colony/ VDL
1862 191 WA
1863 136 WA
Dear Clare
Thank you very much for your response and for your Blog ‘The Convict Hulks of Bermuda’. It is most informative. My interest is in the handful of convicts transported to NSW who, having returned to the UK following transportation to Bermuda, re-offended and were transported to NSW. I was wondering if anyone has looked at this group in more detail.
Many thanks for the figures on the convicts transferred to VDL (Tasmania) and WA from Bermuda. I had located the list of the 191 convicts transported to WA on the ‘Merchantman’ in 1863 but I don’t have anything about the 136 sent to WA around the same time. Do you know more about them?
Best wishes
Christine
Hello Christine, I don’t think anyone has worked on this (very interesting) set of (re)transports. On the second list of convicts, well thank you for your comments because as I go back through my notes to find you the source (National Archives, Kew), I see that these men were sent back to England, not WA. No wonder you hadn’t found a reference to them! With all good wishes, Clare
Hi Clare thank you for letting me know that the second group of convicts sent from Bermuda in 1863 were sent to England and not WA. Christine
What a wonderful post. Do yo have any information on which ships were used as the hulks?
Thank you. I believe that Find My Past has digitised records of all the ships. Good luck! Clare
Hi Clare,
I was wondering if you have idea where I could find records for where a convict went once his sentence was up? He was transported for life on the Medway, and would have arrived in Bermuda in 1848, but I have no idea where to find details on his sentence from there (whether it was commuted etc).
E
Dear Emily, that’s very interesting. I understand that the hulk records are now all online via Find My Past – including those of Bermuda. If you email me his name I will check my notes to see if he did anything notable that I picked up in my research. Best wishes, Clare
Hi Clare,
I am trying to find out what happened to a Patrick Costello sentenced to Transportation for life and went aboard the Bride ship May 1851
From Ireland to Bermuda. There are no records of him in Australia so I wonder where I would find convicts who died in Bermuda?
Would appreciate any help.
Regards
Caroline
Dear Caroline
Thank you for your email. I understand that the Bermuda hulk records are available via Find My Past. You can check their website (and that of The National Archives, London).
Good luck!
Clare
I am very interested in this as I am researching a RICHARD DOWELL b 1816 in Ratcliffe Culey, Leics. I knew he was transported and spent years trying to find him in Australia. One day I Googled just “Richard Dowell convict” and immediately found his medical record at Bermuda Royal Naval Hospital in 1845.
I have just found the entry for his release: From Dec 1849 Quarterly Return “Disch’d by pardon for passage to to Sullivan US [I take it this is the port on the East Coast] 13 Nov 1849. I can see that others on the same page were discharged to Halifax. I would love to know why he was going to Sullivan – was he en route to England? I cannot identify him in England after 1849.
He is not a direct ancestor but my ancestors lived very close in Barwell, Leics, in the 1800s and I think I can see a connection with his grandfather, JOSEPH DOWELL.
Dear Angela
I understand that the convict hulk records are available on Find My Past (or Ancestry). You can view these via a subscription or in a public library. It seems that a number of ex-convicts from Bermuda went to the US after release, though the US authorities were none too happy about it and tried to get the British to stop them. The Halifax discharges that you mention were probably Canadian in origin.
Good luck!
Clare
Hi Clare. There is a folk song entitled Rufford Park Poachers which tells the story of a confrontation between poachers and gamekeepers in Sherwood Forest in 1851. Three of the four prosecuted for this affray were transported to Bermuda in 1853. John Moaks, George Dunlop and George Bowskill were put on board the Dromedary and Medway hulks. In the case of George Bowskill this was a miscarriage of justice and he was later given a reprieve. No compensation in those days! All of the group returned home in 1857 and were released on licence having completed less than half of their 14 year sentence. All went back to their previous homes and families, though how Mrs Dunlop explained the two new infants is anyone’s guess. John Moaks broke his licence and was sent to Australia to complete his 14 years. Thanks for your research which provided the leads to the story of these three.
Dear Sam
Thanks so much for your comment. This is absolutely wonderful material! Thank you for sharing it with us, and I am glad that my blog was useful for your research.
Best wishes
Clare
Hi Clare. As with all research you’re sometimes left with as many questions as when you started. Would there have been a reason that these three were released after serving only 6 years of their 14 year sentence? As I understand it the work in Bermuda hadn’t finished. Maybe there were too many prisoners occupying the 7 hulks for the work that was left. Could the 1857 reform bill ending the use of hulks in Britain have had something to do with it. Or maybe they were perfect prisoners and followed the rules. This adds up for Bowskill and Dunlop. They were never in trouble again (or they didn’t get caught). The youngest, Moaks, only managed two and a half years before he was caught poaching near Tibshelf. He was sent to Australia where he completed the rest of his sentence and was, as far as I can find out, never to return.
Any insight into this mystery of the early release gratefully received.
Dear Sam
Convicts could be released early for good conduct. You might find records of their release (and the reason why) in The National Archives Colonial Office Bermuda records (CO37 series). You could try searching for their names in the online catalogue. If you don’t find anything there, it would be a case of ordering up the relevant years in the archives, and looking to see if they are mentioned.
Good luck!
Clare
Good day Clare,
I have found your post to be very interesting.
My name is Ray Charlton, and when you came to the Dockyard, I was the Chairman of the Westend Development Corporation WEDCo, owners and managers of the Dockyard. I wish that I would have know that you were here.
My interest surrounds the Prison Hulk the Thames. My Maternal great great (great) Grandfather was James Anderson Thompson and I have been told by my family elders that he was the chemist onboard the Thames.
Do you know where I should start looking for addional information on both the Thames and James Thompson?
Thanks<
Ray Charlton
Dear Ray
Thank you for your message. How interesting! i have just word searched all my Bermuda files, but I’m afraid I could not locate JA Thompson. You could try searching through the Colonial Office (CO) files in UK The National Archives catalogue. His name might just come up.
Good luck! Best wishes
Clare
Hello Clare,
I found your fascinating article a few years ago about young Irish male prisoners being sent to Bermuda during the famine years and finally had some hope that I had found a possible lead for my young Irish convict Thomas Ford! He was sentenced to transportation with his mother in 1848 – she came to Van Diemen’s Land and he didn’t. Oral history has it that he ended up in America (no idea if this is true or not). I am assuming that if he did go to the US that his pathway was Bermuda, but I have not yet found him in the records.
I note that in your comment in Feb 2018 above that you mention that some prisoners did make it to America after their time in Bermuda. Other than Ancestry and FindMyPast are there any other records you can recommend for tracing a potential pathway to the US after a sentence was served? Do I need an excuse to visit Kew?! I live in Tasmania.
Thank you for your help,
Caroline
Dear Caroline
Thank you for your email. You certainly have an interesting family history. My sense from the archives is that transportation sometimes split up families in the way that you describe. The Bermuda story is certainly not well known among genealogists in Australia.
The Bermuda convicts were not supposed to go to America, after their release, but that didn’t stop some of them trying. It is entirely possible that your ancestor ended up there – there were frequent shipping links from the island to places like New York. The problem you’ll face as a family historian is that for obvious reasons such ex-convicts would not have declared themselves (and thus would not appear on passenger lists … even where they survive). It’s also entirely possible that they changed their names. It would be really challenging to look for them.
Nonetheless, I wish you every success in your search. I am so glad that you have enjoyed our blog. There are more resources at http://www.convictvoyages.org
Best wishes
Clare
PS I word searched Thomas Ford and Tom Ford in my notes, and nothing appeared.
Hello Clare, thank you for your response and for checking your records. Yes, I think it is a needle in a haystack exercise to find Thomas, but I will keep persevering!
Regards
Caroline
Hello Clare,
Do you know if there are any records available for correspondence between the government and the convicts families after they have died? I have two distant uncles, John and William Robbins, who were transported to Bermuda on the HMS Medway in 1847. They both died in Bermuda, and William left behind a family in County Galway. I have read in other articles that convicts were paid a small amount for their labor which was often claimed by their families after their deaths.Do you know if there are any records that may connect back to their families?
Thank you for this article and the information about the convict hulks. I appreciate all of your research.
You may find some information in the national archives ‘Colonial Office’ papers. They include a few letters from families regarding individual convicts, in the ‘offices and individuals’ series. These are not digitised, and you’d have to go and look. Good luck!
Hi Clare
Have you come across a William Foulkes who went to Bermuda on the Coromonde Hulk in 1825/1826?
I am afraid that I haven’t, but I wish you every success with your research. All the best, Clare
I have just been reading this website and also “Prisoners in Paradise”, thank you for all this and for the effort you have put in. Really interesting to see what life was like, back in those days.
I am researching a Thomas Beesley, b 1801, sentenced in Oxford in 1830 to 14 yrs transportation for manslaughter.
Records *seem* to show he was sent from Oxford to the Hardy on 15 March 1830, and departed to Bermuda on 29 April 1830. He is then received from Bermuda on-board Sovereign to the Leviathan on 25 October 1838 and then released/pardoned on 12 Feb 1839. He then returns to his wife and children in Oxford.
I wonder if I have read these records correctly??? Trying hard to find more information.
Do you know whether there are any records in Bermuda for the years 1831 to 1838 which might allow me to confirm his ‘stay’ there? Not sure where else to look. Be grateful for your advice.
Dear Pamela, I am glad that you found this blog interesting. I just checked my files and I don’t have any information on Thomas Beesley. There are no relevant records in Bermuda, I’m afraid, but if you can get to London you could order up the Colonial Office “Bermuda” volumes, at The National Archives, for the period 1830-38 and see if anything comes up. It is worth looking at both ‘governor’s correspondence’ and ‘alphabetical index’. Good luck! Clare
Greatly interesting blog, thanks.
My 2xG Grandfather Thomas George White (known as George) was a corporal in the Royal Navy when he was aboard the True Briton in 1858, transporting convicts to Bermuda. We have a copy of a typed letter from the Surgeon Superintendent, M Burton MD, which shows he helped stop a mutiny on board. We don’t know much more about him until he returned to the UK. Although. Thomas stayed on the Bermuda until June 1862, when his regiment the 2nd Battery, Royal Artillery RN left the island. He left with his heavily pregnant wife, whom he had met and married in St George’s, Bermuda.
Dear Gill Chester, I am glad that you enjoyed the blog. That’s a fascinating family story! You can find details of the True Briton unrest in the following place in The National Archives at Kew. CO37/166 folios 360-87 – 1 Dec. no. 128: Near-mutiny on the ship True Briton. I just checked my notes though i didn’t see any mention of Thomas/ George White. I wish you the best of luck in your research. Clare
Thanks so much for the info, I’m researching this side of my tree further so a visit to the National Archives will be a must!
Hi Clare,
I have been researching my family tree and have found the naval record of my 3X great grandfather, John Herod. One of the entries on this record has puzzled me for years as it shows that he “served” on HMS Antelope after 29th March 1830 and before 6th December 1831 when he joined the crew of another ship. What seemed strange was that the time aboard the Antelope is not counted towards his total time served in the navy. I have just found out that HMS Antelope was a prison hulk in Bermuda at the time so, presumably, he was a prisoner for at least part of that time. Would this be a reasonable interpretation of this entry in the naval records? Would this indicate that his crime was related to his naval service rather than as a civilian?
I would value any insights you might have in this regard
Thanks
Dear John
Thanks for your email. Interesting stuff! In my view it’s unlikely that your ancestor was a convict, because he was only on HMS Antelope for such a short period of time. Is it possible that he was employed by the Home Office not the Admiralty at this time? The Bermuda hulk records are available on Find My Past, so you could try name searching him there.
All the best, good luck!
Clare
Thanks Clare,
I have looked on Find My Past as suggested and not only don’t I find my ancestor, but I can find no records indicating that the Antelope held any convicts imprisoned after 1826, so the mystery deepens. I think it unlikely that my ancestor would have been employed by the Home Office since he was merely an able seaman and the idea of a Home Office appointment seems highly improbable to my mind. Thanks for your input; I’ll keep on searching!
Hi Clare
I am researching my family tree and have learned that my ancestor John King was transported to Bermuda on the ship Numa in 1841, having previously been held on the York. He was sentenced to ten years for “stealing apples from a store.” The Bermuda hospital records show him as being on the Antelope, but Find My Past has no records for the Antelope from the 1840s, and Ancestry does not give the Antelope as a search option at all. I wondered if he appears in your notes at all, and whether you would recommend the National Archives as a next step.
Many thanks
Dear Louisa
How interesting! I have just been through my notes, and the Antelope was operational during the period 1824-43. Do you think your ancestor might have been transferred to another hulk? You could try searching the others through Find My Past. The National Archives holds records of Bermuda at CO37. The ‘discovery’ catalogue had digitised the index, and so if you search ‘John King’ you might find something.
Best wishes
Clare
Hello Clare,
What a great blog! I’m currently writing a short essay on one Charles Skinner, convicted in 1843 at the Taunton Assizes and sent to Bermuda on the Tenedon which its seems was converted to one of the hulks. He was transported to VDL in 1848 per “Bangalore” and granted a ticket of leave, as were all the “Bangalore” convicts. His occupation in Devon was Ag Lab but by 1848 is ‘sawyer’. Do I assume this means he was cutting limestone?.
Another Tenedos convict, Charles Cornelius was convicted for the same sheep stealing crime. However he was not sent on to Van Diemen’s land. Do you have any thoughts on how the selections to re-transport were made?
Last question..I’m trying to locate a copy of William Sydes article “Account of Life on the Convict Hulks..” in Bermuda Historical Quarterly, Vol 8, 1951, pp 28-19. You referred to it in your ‘Expert Essay’ in convictvoyages.org. I live in Brisbane Australia. Jstore doesn’t have it available. Any suggestions appreciated.
Cheers,
Rosie
Dear Rosie, that is really interesting. Charles Skinner might have been cutting wood? It is possible that Charles Cornelius died before the “Bangalore” left for VDL. The transfers came in the context of the suspension of transportation from Britain to the Australian colonies. British jails started to become overcrowded. Well conducted convicts in Bermuda were selected for VDL, where they were issued conditional pardons or tickets-of-leaves, making way for new arrivals in Bermuda from Britain. To find the Sydes article, you could go to the State Library in Brisbane. They might be able to order it in. I hope this helps. All the best, Clare
Hi Clare,
do you have any records of a Francis Philbin sent to Bermuda aboard the Bangalore.
He was convicted in Ireland in January 1847.
Great blog – lots of great info etc. Thanks. Joy.
Clarte
I live in Melton Mowbray and have a great interest in Bermuda. My good friend is Dr Edward Harris now retired. I have recently had a book published on Amazon Books, ‘The True Story of Peppermint Billy’ which might be of interest to your correspondents regarding the horrors of convict life in Australia, especially VDL. I have also written a short article on the final days of Transportation to Bermuda.