From the "crime doesn't pay" department



Punishment is supposed to be a deterrent to crime - but what is a court supposed to do when the penalty is an attraction, as it was for Joseph Woolley in 1786? Woolley, a soldier in the Coldstream regiment, was caught stealing from a servant at the inn where he lived, and told his victim that he had done it deliberately in order to be transported:

I charged a constable with the prisoner, and the next day at Litchfield-street he confessed breaking open the box, and selling the things to a Jew in Westminster; no promise was made to him of any sort; there was a shirt which he owned taking the Thursday before, which I did not miss; and he told the constable where it was pawned; nothing else was recovered; he said, he did it to go to Botany Bay; for he was tired of the military law, and was determined to go there.

Woolley's boast could, of course, have been the liquor talking, because he was "much in liquor" at the time of his arrest. On the other hand, it isn't hard to imagine that someone stuck at the bottom of the eighteenth-century British class system might dream of transportation as a means of starting fresh in a new society. Nor is it impossible to imagine a soldier of the time chafing at military discipline and deciding to do something drastic in order to terminate his enlistment.



Whatever Woolley's intentions were, however, they left the sentencing court unamused:

... there is this peculiar circumstance in your case, that you have avowed the commission of this crime, with an intention of being transported to Botany Bay, prefering the ignominious punishment of being transported from your own country, to an honest life in it; the Court will indulge you in your desire of being transported, but you will be disappointed in the place, you shall not chuse your place of destination; and therefore the sentence of the Court is, that you be transported for seven years to Africa: and the Court wish it to be understood, that if there are any persons so infatuated and lost to all regard to the laws of their country, as to prefer transportation in an ignominious manner to a distant place, from whence they have no hope of returning, the Court will disappoint their expectations, by changing the place of their transportation.

The court was somewhat more accommodating in the case of Joseph Herbert the following year, who also reacted to being caught by stating that "now he was sure of going to Botany-bay." The judge did not disappoint him:

You are very well remembered here; the expressions you have used, prove you to be an old offender; you seem to have known the distinctions; you told the man who took you up, that you expected to go to Botany-bay; that expectation will certainly be fulfilled.

The moral of the story, if there is one, is that it's all right to expect to go to Botany Bay for theft, but it's a bad idea to want it too much.