Page:History of New South Wales from the records, Volume 1.djvu/586

 462 DR. LANG'S ESTIMATE. Lord Auckland's estimate. Dr. Lang's. No convicts sent to New England. Area of trans- portation. Convicts and slaves. " On the publication of Governor Phillip's Voyage to New South Wales in the year 1790,* an estimate of the number of convicts annually transported to America for some time previous to the war, was made expressly for that work (if I am not mistaken) by the Honorable Mr. Eden, afterwards Lord Auckland, a nobleman who had much better access to correct information on the subject of transportation than President Jefferson ; who, besides, had no prejudice to bias him respecting it, and who had himself been in America in the capacity of envoy-extraordinary from Great Britain during the war; and the result of that estimate was, that the number so transported had been about two thousand every year. " Allowing, however, that this estimate was as much above the truth as President Jefferson's was below it, I conceive it may be taken for granted that, as the system of transporting criminals to America had been in practice from the year 1619, or for one hun- dred and fifty-seven years previous to the American Declaration of Independence, as many convicts had been transported to America during that period as would have amounted to at least five hundred every year for a whole century previous to the war, or to fifty thousand altogether. " It would seem that none of the convicts were ever transported to that part of the American territory called New England, com- prising the States of Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont and Kb ode Islands. The puritanical character and origin of their population preclude such an idea. "The American colonies to which convicts were transported under the old system were those of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, North and South Carolina, Georgia, New Jersey, New York, and Pennsyl- vania ; the population of which amounted at the commencement of the war to 1,800,000, that of the New England colonies being about 700,000. It was, therefore, over a territory extending from north to south from six to seven hundred geographical miles, and of boundless extent to the westward — a countiy, moreover, containing at the close of the period referred to a population of upwards of a million and a half — that 50,000 British convicts were slowly dis- persed in the course of a century and upward. These convicts were literally " bought by the planters for the terms specified in their respective warrants, and worked with their negro slaves under the- lash of an overseer," as is testified by a contemporary writer ; for it would seem that the British Government of that period never inquired how the convicts were treated in the American colonies, provided they were only prevented from returning home." — Dr. Lang, Transportation and Colonisation, 1837, p. 35. it is stated that^"the mercantile returns" of the system amounted to £40,000 per annum ; '* about 2,000 convicts being sold for £20 each." Digitized by VjOOQ IC
 * The only estimate to be found in it appears in a foot-note (p. 6), where