BERMUDA TNA
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PRISONERS in paradise Brenda Mortimer reveals the forgotten story of the convicts transported to Bermuda
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The Naval Yard at Ireland Island in 1848.
onvicted criminals are very well documented and often a detailed account of the convict’s life can be reconstructed from the various court and Home Office records. In the case of convicts transported to Australia, the records are relatively well known to historians. What is little known is that some were sent instead to work in Bermuda, Gibraltar, the Cape of Good Hope and Mauritius. We may think of the islands as being a sub-tropical paradise, but records at The National Archives, show just how difficult life could be for the prisoners there. Between 1823 and 1863 more than 9,000 convicts arrived in Bermuda to build the Royal Naval Dockyard. In the early years of the convict station, most served nearly all their sentence there. Later however, Bermuda was usually used as a preliminary holding place before the prisoner was sent to Australia. After the loss of the American colonies in 1776, there was no port to protect Royal Navy ships in the mid-Atlantic. After
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numerous skirmishes with American privateers, the government decided that a naval base was needed. Midway between colonies in Canada and the West Indies, Bermuda was the obvious choice. In 1809, work began on the construction of the Royal Naval Dockyard; it was a huge task and demanded a substantial workforce. Initially the work was done by slaves, but as there were few slaves on Bermuda and shipping slaves in from other colonies was expensive, progress was slow. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1823 authorising convicts to be employed in hard labour in any colony designated by the King. And after requests from the Master General and Board of Ordnance in Bermuda, Robert Peel, the Home Secretary, agreed that convicts should be used to complete the project. However, there was nowhere on the island to accommodate the men, so Peel decided to use hulks. Initially introduced in the 1780s hulks were decommissioned naval ships which held convicts in often squalid conditions before they were transported. The Antelope was fitted out to accommodate 300 convicts and 200 Royal Marine guards. She sailed from Spithead on 5 January 1824 arriving in Bermuda on 8 February. Records show that nearly all the convicts on
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