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3 bound for Maryland before the implementation of the transportation Act in 1718, the arrangements forconveyingconvictstotheAmericancoloniesweresomewhathaphazard.While some merchants were conscious of the profits to be made by selling convicts as indentured servants, many captains were reluctant to carry them because of the dangers they posed to the safety of both vessel and crew. some of those pardoned on condition of transportation had been expected to make their own travel arrangements but, being loath to leave their homes and families, never did so. They remainedin britain,onlytorevertto“theirformerwickedness.”Thissortofproblem continued to be experienced in scotland even after the English law was applied there in 1766. Women had often been refused passage because their disposal as servants in the colonies had proved too difficult.1 in drafting the new act, the solicitor general (sir William Thomson) and his committee explicitly acknowledged the deficiencies of prior transportation arrangements and sought to correct them with the new statute. Thus the transportation Act created a new legal foundation for those whom the courts had “cast for transportation” to be conveyed to shipping contractors who would be legally bound to transport convicts regardless of their age, sex, or physical condition and to assume responsibility for their safekeeping on board. The contractors would no longer have the option of picking and choosing which convicts they would ship to the colonies and which they would leave behind (see appendix 4). They were obligated to take everyone—even those with little economic value. in order to ensure that removal took place, these contractors were adequately paid and, in addition , were granted a property right in the convicts’ labor for the term of their sentence—a right they could sell upon arrival in America. hefty penalties applied if a contractor failed to comply with the terms of the contract. The implications of these statutory requirements were that the convict women bound for Maryland were first a cargo for shipment and profit and then little more than chattels for sale—human commodities whose circumstances were not unlike thoseofslaves,albeitnotinperpetuity. itwasnocoincidencethatmanyofthecontractors for the convict business were “guinea men”—those who had experience 48 / Chapter 3 in the slave trade—and were well positioned to exploit the opportunities that the convict trade provided. They had on hand vessels fitted out with holds that could securely carry large numbers of people and had crews that had been drilled in dealing with potentially mutinous passengers.2 Jonathan Forward, James gildart, lyonel lyde, and samuel sedgley were all slave traders who became involved with convict transportation. The business was undoubtedly very profitable. in the later years of the transportation period, general merchants such as the half brothers William stevenson and James cheston recognized the attractive returns and decided to include convicts among the other goods they shipped regularly to Maryland. stevenson told his brother that “the trade would not be worth carrying on without the convicts” and predicted later on, rather gleefully, that “the trade will make us genteel fortunes and sales of convicts run up amazingly.”3 Merchants who dealt in the dry goods needed by the colonists would sometimes leave such goods unshipped if they were able instead to load a cargo of convicts.4 The convict trade meshed together very nicely with the trade in tobacco and other commodities such as wheat, flour, lumber, and pig iron—convicts were sent out to the colonies and commodities were brought back from the colonies in the same vessels.5 There were other attractive features to the business as well. it required only modest capitalization—stevenson & cheston began in 1767 with 1,500 pounds and one vessel. With the addition of William randolph in 1768, the firm’s capitalizationroseto9 ,000poundsandseveralvessels;itthenbecamethelargesttrader of convicts in bristol, shipping 93 percent of all the convicts sent to Maryland between1768and1775 .6 Therewasareadyretailmarketwhich,ifitwereoverdependentoncredit ,offeredfewdistributionproblems.Moreover,iftheywerecarefulto schedule their voyages around court calendars, shippers could match convict supply to periods of peak market demand—the late spring and early summer months for tobacco planting or the late summer and early fall for harvesting.7 costs could be underwritten by the per capita subsidies paid by the treasury for each convict shipped from london and its surrounds or by those paid by county justices, who raised special county levies for the purpose. These payments compensated the merchants for convict mortality and the fact that some convicts—such as old women—had no value in the colonies. They smoothed the variability of year-onyear trading returns and they often cross-subsidized poor...

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