The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

by Lindsey Fitzharris

Due to the mounting pressure of London’s overcrowded prisons, 162,000 convicts were transported to Australia between 1787 and 1857. Seven out of eight of these were men. Some were as young as nine, others as old as eighty. Transportation was no easy alternative to imprisonment or hanging. The convicts were first sent to hulks, or floating prisons, on the Thames. The conditions on these decommissioned, rotting ships were horrendous, and even the hospitals could not compete with them as breeding grounds for disease. Prisoners were locked in cages belowdecks in appalling surroundings. One guard remembered “seeing the shirts of the prisoners, when hung out upon the rigging, so black with vermin that the linen positively appeared to have been sprinkled over with pepper.” During cholera outbreaks, the chaplain often refused to bury the dead until there was deemed to be a sufficient quantity of bloated, decomposing corpses of which to dispose. If a prisoner survived the hulks, he was shipped to Australia. One in three died on the grueling sea passage, which could take as long as eight months. If convicts behaved themselves, their sentence could be reduced by a “certificate of freedom,” which would allow them to return home. The majority, however, never made it back to Britain, choosing to live out the remainder of their miserable lives in exile rather than endure the treacherous sea passage to an English port.