destruction, for he will only return to the same kind of life which he has led before, and will be an instrument in the hands of very bad people, who make use of boys of that sort to rob houses.”
He was found guilty of the felony, but not of the burglary, and sentenced to transportation for seven years “to some of His Majesty's Colonies and Plantations in America.” There was no separate child's prison for him pending transportation, and so he was thrown in with the adults at fearsome Newgate.
Lost children like Hudson had lately proliferated in the cities. Chimney sweeps, commonly used by professional criminals to gain entry to houses, were a sign of the disordered times. They were orphans and the illegitimate children of paupers, often sold into service for seven years. Such a child “is disposed of for twenty or thirty shillings, being a smaller price than the value of a terrier.” For boys like Hudson, there was no childhood. William Blake mourned their misuse in two separate poems, both entitled
The Chimney Sweeper.
When my mother died, I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry, “Weep! Weep! Weep! Weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
Blake's second chimney sweep is also relevant to Hudson's caste of boys:
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
Reforming evangelical groups were urging legislation to protect children from tyrannous masters, from the claustrophobia of the chimney, the lung damage, the death by suffocation, and the criminal employment to which their trade often condemned them. But the first act alleviating their lives would not be passed until the year Hudson was already part of a great new penal experiment at the earth's end.
Nine-year-old John Hudson had been put upon a ship,
Mercury,
which left the Thames for North America on 2 April 1784. Georgia was under no obligation to receive him, being no longer a British colony, but the captain intended if rebuffed to try Nova Scotia. On the morning of 8 April, the convicts seized the ship. John Hudson was in one of two small boats that left the
Mercury
off Torbay, on Devon's southeast coast, on the morning of 14 April. He escaped the statutory death penalty for returning from transportation purely on the technicality that he had been intercepted by the crew of a naval vessel while still on the water. Prisoners who had not left the
Mercury
but stayed on board were ultimately chained again and their labour sold off by the master of the ship, on the instructions of the ship-owners, in Honduras, along the Mosquito Coast of Central America.
At first kept in Exeter gaol, Hudson was tried for escape and transferred to the
Dunkirk,
a dismasted former warship moored off Plymouth as a floating prison. The Plymouth hulks were less carefully run than those on the Thames, and the prisoners laboured on fortification works in Plymouth Harbour. It was not until December 1784 that Hudson and the other male prisoners received an issue of clothing, including shoes. Dr. Cowdry, the surgeon who attended the hulks for part of Hudson's time there, said that the men had “almost every disease which vice and immorality could produce. Some of them had very bad venereal complaints,” while others had consumption. Yet Hudson lasted nearly three years there, and was one of over 200 convicts, including forty-one women, sent on 10 March 1787 from the dark
Dunkirk
to their transports in Phillip's convict fleet. The Philanthropic Society, which would later intervene in the case of transportees Hudson's age, was not founded until 1788.
A NYONE READING THE O LD B AILEY transcripts is struck by the imbalance between minor miscreancies and the ultimate, transglobal punishment of transportation. In modern terms, what happened with the Georgians was the equivalent of sending a shoplifter to some biosphere on another
He was found guilty of the felony, but not of the burglary, and sentenced to transportation for seven years “to some of His Majesty's Colonies and Plantations in America.” There was no separate child's prison for him pending transportation, and so he was thrown in with the adults at fearsome Newgate.
Lost children like Hudson had lately proliferated in the cities. Chimney sweeps, commonly used by professional criminals to gain entry to houses, were a sign of the disordered times. They were orphans and the illegitimate children of paupers, often sold into service for seven years. Such a child “is disposed of for twenty or thirty shillings, being a smaller price than the value of a terrier.” For boys like Hudson, there was no childhood. William Blake mourned their misuse in two separate poems, both entitled
The Chimney Sweeper.
When my mother died, I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry, “Weep! Weep! Weep! Weep!”
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
Blake's second chimney sweep is also relevant to Hudson's caste of boys:
Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smiled among the winter's snow,
They clothed me in the clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.
Reforming evangelical groups were urging legislation to protect children from tyrannous masters, from the claustrophobia of the chimney, the lung damage, the death by suffocation, and the criminal employment to which their trade often condemned them. But the first act alleviating their lives would not be passed until the year Hudson was already part of a great new penal experiment at the earth's end.
Nine-year-old John Hudson had been put upon a ship,
Mercury,
which left the Thames for North America on 2 April 1784. Georgia was under no obligation to receive him, being no longer a British colony, but the captain intended if rebuffed to try Nova Scotia. On the morning of 8 April, the convicts seized the ship. John Hudson was in one of two small boats that left the
Mercury
off Torbay, on Devon's southeast coast, on the morning of 14 April. He escaped the statutory death penalty for returning from transportation purely on the technicality that he had been intercepted by the crew of a naval vessel while still on the water. Prisoners who had not left the
Mercury
but stayed on board were ultimately chained again and their labour sold off by the master of the ship, on the instructions of the ship-owners, in Honduras, along the Mosquito Coast of Central America.
At first kept in Exeter gaol, Hudson was tried for escape and transferred to the
Dunkirk,
a dismasted former warship moored off Plymouth as a floating prison. The Plymouth hulks were less carefully run than those on the Thames, and the prisoners laboured on fortification works in Plymouth Harbour. It was not until December 1784 that Hudson and the other male prisoners received an issue of clothing, including shoes. Dr. Cowdry, the surgeon who attended the hulks for part of Hudson's time there, said that the men had “almost every disease which vice and immorality could produce. Some of them had very bad venereal complaints,” while others had consumption. Yet Hudson lasted nearly three years there, and was one of over 200 convicts, including forty-one women, sent on 10 March 1787 from the dark
Dunkirk
to their transports in Phillip's convict fleet. The Philanthropic Society, which would later intervene in the case of transportees Hudson's age, was not founded until 1788.
A NYONE READING THE O LD B AILEY transcripts is struck by the imbalance between minor miscreancies and the ultimate, transglobal punishment of transportation. In modern terms, what happened with the Georgians was the equivalent of sending a shoplifter to some biosphere on another
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