---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Douglas Cummins <dcumyns@gmail.com> Date: Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 1:38 PM Subject: [MSATTALA] Fwd: Prison Life of Bonded Passengers to America To: "msattala@rootsweb.com" <msattala@rootsweb.com> The following is forwarded for informational purposes only.... Prison Life of Bonded Passengers to America (Adapted from Emigrants in Chains, by Peter Wilson Coldham.) Great Britain made wholesale use of its prison population to build a white labor force for the American colonies. We now know that nearly 50,000 British and Irish, male and female, prisoners were removed from jails, workhouses, brothels, and houses of correction and transported to America, mostly to work in the tobacco-growing colonies of Maryland and Virginia. Many, though not all, of these "bonded passengers" were petty thieves or people down on their luck. A great many had been imprisoned for indebtedness. However onerous their initial exposure to the colonies might become, as the following paragraphs indicate, immigration to the Americas was bound to be better than life in a British prison. This article is excerpted from Peter Wilson Coldham's amazing book, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars and other Undesirables, 1607-1750. It offers the reader a glimpse of conditions in London's prisons during the era of forced emigration. By the middle of the 18th century Henry Fielding was able to comment that "there are few, if any, nations or countries where the poor are in a more scandalous, nasty condition than here in England." The abundance of the poor and of draconian laws to protect property combined to ensure that prison populations were maintained at a high level. William Blackstone estimated that in his time there were 160 offences meriting the death penalty, and this number was to be increased substantially in ensuing years. London alone boasted 14 prisons of which the most ancient and notorious was Newgate. Dick Whittington, three times Lord Mayor of London between 1397 and 1420, bequeathed money for its repair and, in commemoration of his gift, his cat was carved upon the outer gate. Through this gate some 20,000 felons passed on the first step of their long journey to America. In 1754 it was described as: "a large prison and made very strong the better to secure such sort of criminals which too much fill it. It is a dismal place within. The prisoners are sometimes packed so close together, and the air so corrupted by their stench and nastiness, that it occasions a disease called the Jail Distemper of which they die by dozens, and cartloads of them are carried out and thrown into a pit in the churchyard of Christchurch without ceremony; and so infectious is this distemper that several judges, jurymen and lawyers etc. have taken it off the prisoners when they have been brought to the Old Bailey to be tried, and died soon after. And to this wretched place innocent people are sometimes sent, and loaded with irons before their trial, not to secure them but to extort money from them by a merciless jailor; for if they have money to bribe him they may have the irons as light as they please. Sweet herbs are strewed in the court and passages of it to prevent infection; and the snuffing up of vinegar, it is said, is the most likely way to preserve the healths of those that are obliged to attend trials." To Londoners Newgate was known, with reason, as "hell above ground." Fees were extorted by the jailers for almost every service, and it went hard with those unable or unwilling to pay. If prisoners required bedding it could be hired from the turnkey, otherwise they shared the filthy straw strewn over the stone floor. Other London prisons imposed similar exactions. One inmate of the Fleet who was confined for debt in 1729 and who refused to pay his fees "had irons put upon his legs, which were too little, so that in putting them on his legs were like to have been broken. He was dragged away into the dungeon, where he lay without a bed, and loaded with irons so close rivetted that they kept him in continual torment and mortified his legs." In the following year the prison chaplain reported that he had visited an inmate whose legs and feet were so swollen from his irons and from the great cold that he was unable to rise, and died a few days later. After arrest by the parish constable, a suspect would be carted to the "hold" at Newgate where all prisoners, convicted or awaiting trial, were kept. This room, dark and with a floor of stone, was entered by a hatch measuring 15 by 20 feet. Inside the 'hold' was one wooden barrack bed on which, according to a description given in 1707, "you may repose yourself if your nose suffer you to rest." Around the room were ring bolts to which prisoners considered to be disorderly were chained. The fee for securing removal from here to more salubrious quarters was two shillings and six pence. As soon as prisoners entered the jail, heavy iron manacles were clapped on their hands and feet unless they were prepared to buy "easement" from the turnkey. To add to their own physical and mental sufferings, Newgate prisoners could scarcely avoid witnessing the even grosser brutalities inflicted on others. From here women were dragged away to be burned alive for murdering their husbands or, until as late as 1753, for clipping coins. For this same offence of coin-clipping, the sentence for men, until 1670, was hanging, drawing and quartering, after which their remains, including their heads, were boiled and salted in that part of the prison known as Jack Ketch's Kitchen. Thomas Ellwood, a Quaker friend of John Milton and William Penn, who was thrown into Newgate in 1662 for attending a Friends' service, described the prison as hell on earth, being a large and round prison, having in the middle a stout oak pillar which held up the chapel above. At night the prisoners fastened their hammocks at one end to this pillar and, at the other, to the wall in three tiers up to the ceiling until there was no further space. Then on the stone floor a fourth layer was stretched out with rough beds being provided for the sick and weakly: "When we first came into Newgate there lay in a little place like a closet in the room where we were lodged, the quartered bodies of three men who had been executed some days before for a real or pretended plot, and the reason why their quarters lay there so long was that the relatives were all that while petitioning to have leave to bury them; which at length, with much ado, was obtained for the quarters but not for the heads, which were ordered to be set up in some part of the City. I saw the heads when they were brought up to be boiled; the hangman fetched them in a dirty dust basket out of some by-place, and setting them down among the felons, he and they made great sport with them. They took them by the hair, flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then, giving them ill-names, boxed them on the ears and checks. Which done, the Hangman put them into his Kettle and parboiled them with Bay-salt and Cummin-seed--that to keep them from putrefaction and this to keep off the fowls from seizing on them. The whole sight was both frightful and loathsome and begat an abhorrence in my nature." As the law then stood, a person convicted of theft was liable to forfeit his possessions to the Crown, so that some courageous spirits, accused of this offence, refused to plead in order to protect their families. Until this law was amended in 1714, such foolhardiness could be punished by "peine forte et dure": offenders were taken to Newgate where their bodies were stretched by ropes while large stones and heavy weights were laid upon their bodies, thus slowly crushing all life out of them unless or until they changed their minds. Even after this barbaric means of persuasion was overtaken by more humane legislation, prisoners who refused to plead could still be coaxed to another view on application of a whipcord thumbscrew. [END OF ARTICLE] Editor's Note: The foregoing excerpt merely scratches the surface of Mr. Coldham's essay on prison life during the age of exploration and colonization. Emigrants in Chains also discusses the convicts' backgrounds, British justice and judicial corruption, the business of transportation, the kidnapping and forced emigration of Scottish Highlanders, thumbnail sketches of emigrants, and much more. It's an extraordinary story and MUST reading for anyone who hopes to appreciate the conditions of forced servitude in the 17th and 18th centuries. For more information, visit the following URL: www.genealogical.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&item_number=1109 The Attala County Web Site is in need of contributions of photographs, documents, family letters, diaries, etc. Submit your material to Everette Carr at: <a href="mailto:attaladirector@gmail.com">Attala Director</a> ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to MSATTALA-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message -- Jeannie God Bless God Speed kymonroe@rootsweb.com ancestraltrackers.org