Between 1788 and 1868 Britain shipped about 162,000 convicts to Australia. Wikipedia's ship lists record 745 of their voyages. This is a map of every one of them: where the ships sailed from, when they arrived, how long the passage took and who did not survive it, set against a century and a half of penal transportation around the world.
In May 1787 eleven ships left Portsmouth for the other side of the world, carrying more than 1,400 people, over half of them convicts. They reached Botany Bay in January 1788, 252 days later, and met the Eora people, who, the First Fleet's own article says, "seemed curious but suspicious of the newcomers". For the next eighty years Britain used the Australian colonies as its prison. Men, women and children convicted of crimes from petty theft to rebellion were sentenced to "transportation beyond the seas", put aboard hired merchant ships and sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), Norfolk Island and finally Western Australia. The last ship, Hougoumont, reached Fremantle in January 1868.
Volunteers on Wikipedia have listed those voyages colony by colony. The lists are not complete, and for most ships they give only a name, a port and a date of arrival, but together they hold 834 rows. The map below draws each voyage on the usual sailing route of the time. Press play to watch the traffic build from a handful of ships a year to more than thirty in the 1830s, move from Sydney to Hobart and Norfolk Island in the 1840s, and end on the far side of the continent at the Swan River. These were people, not cargo, and the ships carried them to land that was not empty: the dispossession of Aboriginal people runs underneath the whole story.
Lines: each listed voyage from overseas, coloured by the colony it arrived in, drawn on a stylised sailing route (via the South Atlantic and the Cape of Good Hope, or across the Indian Ocean). The tables give only the departure port and the colony, not the track. Thicker lines: voyages for which a table or ship article gives the number of convicts (mostly Western Australia, the 1840s ships to Norfolk Island and the first three fleets). Circles at the ports: voyages that sailed from there. Purple rings (Map layers): other places of penal transportation, from Wikipedia's articles. Source: English Wikipedia's lists of convict ships to New South Wales, Tasmania, Norfolk Island and Western Australia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Land: Natural Earth.
The lists start slowly. The First Fleet's convict transports arrived in January 1788; the Second Fleet in 1790; the Third in 1791. Through the 1790s and 1800s only 30 and 32 voyages a decade arrived from overseas, while Britain was at war with France. The flood came after Waterloo. Between 1815 and 1840 the lists hold 567 arrivals, 76% of the whole, peaking at 35 in 1833, and the 1830s alone saw 264.
Convict ships arriving from overseas, by year and colony
Voyages in Wikipedia's lists with a departure place outside Australia, by year of arrival. Transfers between Australian ports, the Parkhurst boys' ships and voyages listed twice are left out. Hover or tap a year.
Then the traffic moved. New South Wales stopped taking convicts in 1840 and the ships turned to Van Diemen's Land and, for a few years, straight to Norfolk Island. From 1841 to 1849 the lists hold 16 arrivals in Van Diemen's Land, 10 at Norfolk Island and only 5 in New South Wales. The last listed ship to New South Wales was Adelaide, on 24 December 1849; transportation there was abolished on 1 October 1850. Van Diemen's Land's list ends with Sir Robert Seppings on 8 July 1852, although its own article says the last ship, St Vincent, arrived on 26 May 1853. Western Australia, which asked for convicts to build its colony, received 43 ships between 1850 and 1868.
When each colony took convicts
First and last listed arrival from overseas, and the number of voyages. Click a colony to show it alone on the map.
Wikipedia's article on convicts in Australia gives the totals: about 162,000 convicts from Great Britain and Ireland between 1788 and 1868, or "about 164,000 ... onboard 806 ships". The lists hold 745 voyages from overseas, 92% of that 806, so most of the ships are there. The people mostly are not. For New South Wales and Tasmania the lists give no numbers of convicts at all, only names, ports and dates. Numbers come from the Western Australia list, the Norfolk Island list, the tables of the first three fleets and a few ship articles: 108 voyages, 14% of the total, carrying 21,871 convicts between them.
How much of each colony's traffic has a head count
Listed voyages from overseas, split into those for which a table or ship article gives the number of convicts and those for which it does not.
Those voyages carried 203 convicts each on average, the same as the 203 implied by 164,000 people on 806 ships. If every listed voyage carried that average, the lists would cover about 151,000 people. The one list that is complete is Western Australia's: its 43 voyages add up to 9,674 convicts, against the 9,668 and 9,721 given in two other Wikipedia articles.
The First Fleet took 252 days. The voyage got much quicker. For 53 voyages the fleet tables or the ships' own Wikipedia articles give both a departure and an arrival date. The First Fleet anchored at Tenerife and spent a month at Rio de Janeiro on the way. The first three fleets took a median of 190 days; ships of the 1820s and 1830s, 115. The slowest was Lady Juliana of the Second Fleet, whose voyage with 222 women took 309 days. The fastest was Scindian, the first convict ship to Western Australia, in 89 days in 1850; Hougoumont, the last, took 90.
How long the voyage took
Days from departure to arrival, for the 53 voyages where both dates are given. Squares: the first three fleets (their articles' tables). Circles: dates in the ship's own article. Lines: median for each period. Hover a point.
Mangles, which made more convict voyages than any other ship in the lists, is typical of the later years. Her article dates 5 of her 9 voyages, with a median of 112 days, and records no more than 3 convict deaths on any voyage for which it gives a figure. The dates here are a small and uneven sample, 5 voyages before 1820 and 3 after 1840, so the trend is clearer than any single median.
The Second Fleet was the worst. Its contractors were paid a flat fee per head, "whether they landed alive or not". Of the 1,038 convicts embarked, 273 died during the voyage, 26%, and 486 landed sick; 124 more died soon after. (The articles disagree slightly: another gives 267 deaths among 1,006 prisoners.) The Third Fleet's table records 182 deaths among 2,067 convicts who boarded its ships, 8.8%, from 3.1% on Salamander to 14% on Britannia.
Convicts who died at sea
Share of embarked convicts who died on the voyage: the Second Fleet as a whole, each ship of the Third Fleet, and the 24 later voyages whose ship articles give both the number embarked and the deaths. Hover a bar.
Later voyages were very different. Across the 24 voyages in ship articles that give the numbers, 37 of 4,765 convicts died, 0.8%, and 9 voyages lost nobody. Shipwreck was the danger that remained. The New South Wales list records that Amphitrite was wrecked at the outset of her voyage, in 1833 according to her article, and 108 women convicts and 12 children drowned, and that Neva was lost in Bass Strait with 224 lives; the Tasmania list that George III was wrecked "with heavy loss of life before she could disembark her convicts".
Most ships left from the Thames or the Solent: 203 voyages from London, Woolwich, Deptford, Gravesend, Sheerness and the Downs, 131 from Portsmouth and Spithead. But the busiest single port in the lists is Cork, with 101 voyages, and Dublin had 51. Ireland supplied 163 of the 627 voyages from Britain and Ireland, 26%, and nearly all of them went to New South Wales: 34% of its ships from the British Isles were Irish, against 6% of Van Diemen's Land's in the lists and 1 ship to Western Australia.
The busiest ports of departure
Listed voyages from overseas by the place the ship sailed from, coloured by region. "England (port not given)": the list says only England. Click a bar to see the port on the map.
Not every convict came from the British Isles. The lists hold 101 voyages that sailed from India, Ceylon, Mauritius or Singapore, 42 of them from Calcutta and 33 from Mauritius. Where the tables give a number it was small: the 6 such ships to Western Australia carried 38 convicts between them, and the New South Wales notes describe some of the others as carrying "military convicts". Western Australia's ships, by contrast, sailed most often from Portland in Dorset (15 of its 43) and Plymouth (9).
There was no such thing as a purpose-built convict ship. As Wikipedia's article on convict ships puts it, "there was no ship specifically built as a convict vessel": the government chartered ordinary merchant ships, among them East Indiamen and whalers, for one voyage at a time. The lists name 453 ships, 296 of which made a single listed voyage. For 503 voyages the ship's article gives its launch year; the median ship was 14 years old when it arrived. A few ships made a career of it.
Ships that made the most convict voyages
Listed voyages from overseas, grouped by the ship's Wikipedia article. "Article says": the number of convict voyages stated in the ship's own article, where it gives one. Click a row to see the ship's voyages on the map.
The lists and the ship articles agree well: for 121 of the 144 ships whose article states how many convict voyages they made, the lists hold exactly that many.
About 24,000 of the convicts, one in seven, were women. Some 80% had been convicted of theft, usually petty. Although they were routinely described as courtesans, no women were transported for prostitution, which was not a transportable offence. The lists rarely say who a ship carried, so only 20 voyages can be identified as carrying women from the tables, the fleet records and the ship articles, among them Lady Penrhyn of the First Fleet and Lady Juliana of the Second. During the 25 years that Elizabeth Fry's British Ladies' Society worked with women convicts, 12,000 women were transported on 106 ships.
The convict population of New South Wales, by sex
Convicts in the colony in the years given in Wikipedia's article on convict women. Line: women's share (right scale). Hover a year.
The imbalance grew as the colony grew. Women were 26% of the convicts in New South Wales in 1788 and 12% in 1841; in 1836 there were 25,254 male convicts and 2,577 female ones. Western Australia took no women at all: it asked, as a condition, "that no female convicts be transported".
The convict colonies were built on Aboriginal land. When the First Fleet moved from Botany Bay to Sydney Cove it encountered the Eora people, including the Bidjigal clan. Wikipedia's article on penal transportation states it plainly: violent conflict on the Australian frontier between Indigenous Australians and the colonists "began only months after the First Fleet landed, lasting over a century". Convicts were on both sides of it. Convicts forced to work on the frontier were sometimes attacked, convicts and former convicts carried out killings such as the Myall Creek massacre, and in the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars a group of Irish convicts joined the coalition of Eora, Gandangara, Dharug and Tharawal nations fighting the colonists. Every ship on this map landed its convicts on Aboriginal land.
Inside the colonies, convicts who reoffended were sent on again, to places of secondary punishment: Norfolk Island in its second period, Moreton Bay (now Brisbane, 1824 to 1842), Macquarie Harbour on the wild west coast of Van Diemen's Land (1822 to 1833) and Port Arthur (1833 to 1877). Eleven convict sites, from Port Arthur to Fremantle Prison, were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. Turn on "Penal stations in Australia" in Map layers to see the four.
Australia was Britain's second dumping ground. Before the American Revolution, convicts were shipped to Virginia and Maryland under the Transportation Act of 1717: "commonly accepted" to be 30,000, with estimates from 50,000 to 120,000. When the American Revolution stopped transportation in 1776, convicts were held instead in prison hulks, old ships moored in the Thames and the naval ports, until Australia was chosen. Later, from the 1820s to 1863, convicts from Britain and Ireland were sent to Bermuda to build the Royal Naval Dockyard, living on hulks.
Penal transportation around the world
Places that received transported convicts, with the years and the numbers Wikipedia's articles give. Where an article gives no total, none is shown. Click a row to see the place on the map.
Sakhalin and Siberia: the articles used give when transportation began but not when it ended.
France sent convicts to the bagnes of French Guiana from 1852, more than 80,000 of them to the Devil's Island system, most never to return; the last came home in 1953. New Caledonia took about 22,000 between 1864 and 1897, most notably the Communards. Russia used katorga, penal labour in Siberia, from the 17th century and set up a penal colony on Sakhalin in 1857, which Anton Chekhov visited and described in "Sakhalin Island". British India sent prisoners of the 1857 rebellion to the Andaman Islands, where the first 200 convicts landed in March 1858 and the Cellular Jail, with 698 solitary cells, held independence activists until the penal settlement closed in 1947.
Data. Wikipedia's "Convict ships to New South Wales" (604 rows including Prince of Wales, a First Fleet transport the list omits), "Convict ships to Tasmania" (147), "Convict ships to Norfolk Island" (33) and "List of convict ship voyages to Western Australia" (50), at the revisions given in the paper. A voyage from overseas is a row with an arrival year and a departure place outside Australia. I leave out 57 transfers between Australian ports, 7 ships that took 234 boys from Parkhurst prison to Western Australia as apprentices, 15 voyages that appear in two colonies' lists (one ship landing convicts at Hobart and then Sydney, for instance) and 10 rows with no arrival year, mostly wrecks and captures. Years are years of arrival.
Numbers, dates and routes. Convict numbers, departure dates and deaths come from the Norfolk Island and Western Australia tables, the tables in the First, Second and Third Fleet articles, and sentences in 33 voyages' ship articles, each kept only where the article's arrival date is within three days of the list's. Departure ports are drawn at coordinates I chose for each harbour; "England" and "Ireland" without a port are drawn in the Channel and off Cork. The routes are stylised sailing tracks, not logged ones: the lists say only where a ship left and which colony it reached.
What this is not. Wikipedia's lists are compiled by volunteers from Charles Bateson's "The Convict Ships" and other sources; the Tasmania list in particular is shorter than the traffic it describes, and none of the lists has been checked here against the original records. The count of women's voyages is a floor. Figures for other countries are those the articles state, and the articles' own sources vary in quality.