The 1837 Select Committee on Transportation
Who was William Molesworth?
William Molesworth was an ambitious young radical who opposed Transportation in any form.
He had been involved in the 1832 campaign for parliamentary reform and he ran a radical
journal called ‘The London Review’. The radicals were group of people who had become
frustrated with the British Whig Government who had taken power in 1835. The Whigs were a
reformist style of government but the radicals wanted further reform such as greater voting
rights and reform of punishments and abolition of slavery in America. Molesworth opposed
transportation like many other reformers at the time as he argued it bred an immoral and corrupt
society (Australia) in a colony of the British Empire, it did not reform the criminal, and the level of
control and punishment given to convicts was inconsistent and unregulated. Molesworth
essentially wanted greater reform in many matters yet he saw a particular opportunity in the
colonial matters to get the support of the opposing Tory party against the Whigs as the British
Empire and matters within it were of utmost importance to the wealth of Britain. Molesworth was
convinced that transportation should be abolished completely and instead the system of
‘systematic colonization’ should be set up instead whereby free workers from Britain would be
given the opportunity to migrate to Australia thus colonising it in a more effective manner.
What was the committee?
In 1837 Molesworth successfully initiated support for the establishment of a select committee on
transportation (a group of 15 men) to ‘inquire into the System of Transportation, its efficacy as a
Punishment, its influence on the Moral State of society in the penal colonies and how far it is
susceptible of improvement’. The men represented a cross-section of political views from
radicals to Tories with Molesworth as chairman. The committee held 38 meetings between 1837
and 1838. It examined 23 witnesses (most of whom were already against transportation). This
was the first official committee which had been organised to investigate the convict system
since the Bigge inquiry in 1819 (which had made moves towards reform in creating the
assignment system but transportation had continued). It claimed to be an objective tribunal but
as one historian has argued it was in fact ‘a biased show trial designed to present a catalogue of
antipodean horrors which was conducted by the Whig government against a system they were
already planning to get rid of’.
What were it’s findings?
Molesworth presented the findings to the government and concluded that the assignment of
convicts to private masters produced unequal treatment and that this inequity had nothing to do
with the nature of offender’s crimes. It concluded that transportation was not a sufficient
punishment. Transportation lacked terror even though 50 to 100 lashed were given as
punishments. The committee also concluded that transportation was very expensive. It found
that between 1787 and 1836 72,000 convicts were hardened not reformed by their experience.
Furthermore the committee pointed out that the penal colonies were so far away that people in
England were unaware of the severity of life and consequently there was no deterrence. The
committee wanted transportation halted and replaced by two to fifteen years of hard labour at
home or at best the ‘systematic colonization’ system mentioned above.
Extracts from Molesworth are as follows:
‘It is difficult to conceive how a man....merely having the common feelings of morality, with the
ordinary dislike of crime, could be tempted, by any prospect of gain, to emigrate with this wife
and family, to one of these colonies, after a picture has been presented to his mind of what
would be his probably lot. To dwell in Sydney...would be much the same as inhabiting the
lowest purlieus of St Giles’s in London where drunkenness and shameless profligacy are not
more apparent than in the capital of Australia. Every kind of gentle feeling of human nature is
constantly outraged by the perpetual spectacle of the lash – by the gangs of slaves in irons- by
the horrid detail in penal settlements; till the heart of the immigrant is gradually deadened to the
sufferings of others, and he becomes at last as cruel as the other gaolers of these vast prisons.
The whole system of transportation violates the feelings of the adult, barbarizes the habits and
demoralizes the principles of the rising generation, and the result is to use the expression of a
public newspaper, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ (chaos, even worse than hell on earth – all loss of
morality)’
What was the impact of the Molesworth Committee of 1837?
The direct impact of the Molesworth Committee in ending transportation has been debated by
historians.
It certainly provoked a lot of shock and horror at the immoral picture painted of the colony by the
committee. It also can be said that the committee led to changes in the system of convict labour
and to more experiments aimed at the reformation of convicts The report painted a dismal
picture of a corrupt colonial life and eventually this resulted in the end of transportation to the
mainland – New South Wales – in 1840. It changed attitudes towards the purpose of
punishments and made people question transportation more than they had done before. It also
prompted the initiative to people New South Wales with free labour rather than convict labour.
However the practice of shipping aboard the most serious offenders was not actually abolished
as a judicial sentence until 1857 and it took another ten years until transportation was abolished
all together.
The changes to the system of convict labour that developed after the Molesworth Committee
which could be said to have initiated the British government to take action, was firstly the
experimentation of more reforming methods of punishment for convicts in Norfolk Island from
1840. This was initiated by a man called Captain Alexander Maconochie who followed
Molesworth’s line in condemning the corruptness of colonial society. He said assignment of
convicts only caused their masters to become corrupt as they gained the cruel habits of slave
masters. His ideas gained plenty of support in the atmosphere of shock brought about by the
Molesworth Committee He proposed a scheme for the punishment and reformation of convicts
where they would receive marks for good conduct and lose them for bad behaviour. Prisoners
would be able to choose and associate with companions of their own choice in return for good
conduct. He believed it would make physical punishment unnecessary and encourage a sense
of trust and responsibility in convicts. Maconochie was allowed to trial this scheme on Norfolk
Island. But Maconochie’s experiment was short-lived. He rated it as a success but in the
colonist’s eyes it was handing virtual freedom to criminals. He had even given the convicts a
day’s holiday on the Queen’s birthday and there were reports of inmates enjoying dinner with
rum and fireworks. Lord Russell, the Home Secretary, took the same view as the colonists and
Maconchie was dismissed after four years.
Following the Norfolk Island experiment it could be argued that further evidence of the changed
attitudes towards transportation as a result of Molesworth was the introduction of the probation
system in 1842. This got rid of the assignment system and provided a far more structure regime
where the criminal would pass through 5 reformatory stages on their way to reformation and
liberty. They would first complete a period of detention in a prison on Norfolk Island to instil
discipline, then they would enter a ‘probation gang’ where they would work on government
projects like roads and bridges. They would be given religious instruction to reform them too.
After their period of probation the prisoner received a ‘probation pass’ which he could use to
work for wages for a local government. The British Crown would save money by doing this and
the criminal would be reformed. The final two stage were then the ‘ticket-of leave’ where the
man could choose his own master, and then a conditional or absolute pardon. But the probation
system failed to survive for very long as the tide had irreversibly swung against transportation.
Perceptions of the convict colony as immoral and plagued by sodomy continued to grow and
was bolstered by further reports of homosexuality amongst probation gangs. It also proved not
to be economically viable. Thus in 1846 all transportation to Norfolk Island was suspended by
the British Government.
Further attempts at reforming the transportation but not abandoning it completely continued into
the later 1840’s as the British government did not have enough prisons to match the rising crime
rate and still believed a solution could be found whereby punishment could become respectable
and reforming and ‘purge’ Britain of it’s underclass. Under the control of Lord Grey the idea of
putting convicts in prison in isolation in England (e.g Pentonville) for a couple of years, and then
sending them to Australia once they had been reformed to complete their sentences was
trialled. It was believed this would avoid the opportunity of corruption which plagued the
probation system. Thus by 1849 the first convict ship to enter Sydney Harbour in a decade
arrived laden with 239 male prisoners.
But the final end of transportation came soon after. It has been argued that in fact it was the
angry reactions of the anti-transportation movement which was founded by free colonists in
Australia and gained vast support that led to the final abolishment of the system. Colonists who
were increasingly proud of their new land, and increasingly less dependent on Convict labour
turned more and more against the dumping of convicts on their home ground: ‘The League’s
work played a large part – more than is usually credited with – in killing transportation’ (Robert
Hughes).
The end of Transportation was also initiated by the discovery of Gold in 1851 in New South was:
‘Punishment by exile to an area separated from the gold fields by only a narrow stretch of water’
seemed absurd. The rise in prices brought by the gold rush also made the exile operation more
expensive for the British government. As Hughes has argued ‘Gold plucked off the last rags of
terror that clung to the name of Australia. ‘With a quarter of Britain clamouring for tickets to the
goldfields, who was to think that a trip to El Dorado at government expense constituted a fearful
punishment?’ (Hughes).
A formal end to transportation to Norfolk Island took place in 1853 and in 1868 Transportation
was finally abolished. The British Government were finding prisons in Britain were cheaper, they
faced continuing campaigns from the anti-transportation league, and they did not want to
alienate their eastern colonies by continuing to dump convicts in Australia.