Tristan Hotham

Researcher of campaigns and platforms. Maker of other things.

Transported: every convict ship to Australia, mapped

Title card reading 'Transported' in black and red on pale paper, beside a world map with a thick braid of coloured lines running from the British Isles south through the Atlantic, round the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Ocean to Fremantle, Hobart, Sydney and Norfolk Island, and thinner lines from India and Mauritius. Below, a bar chart of ships arriving each year, rising to 35 in 1833. Text: every convict voyage to Australia in Wikipedia's lists, 745 ships, 1788 to 1868.

Between 1788 and 1868 Britain shipped about 162,000 convicts to the other side of the world. Wikipedia’s volunteers have listed their ships colony by colony. I mapped all 745 voyages, and then followed the trail on to French Guiana, Sakhalin and the Andaman Islands.

Explore the interactive map
Read the paper

On 13 May 1787 eleven ships left Portsmouth carrying more than 1,400 people, over half of them convicts. They reached Botany Bay 252 days later, in January 1788, and moved on to Sydney Cove, where they met the Eora people. That was the start of eighty years in which Britain used the Australian colonies as its prison. Men, women and children sentenced to “transportation beyond the seas” were put on hired merchant ships and sent to New South Wales, Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania), Norfolk Island and, last of all, Western Australia.

English Wikipedia has a list of the convict ships for each of those colonies. They are patchy, and for most voyages they give only a ship’s name, the port it left and the date it arrived, but between them they hold 834 rows. Leave out the transfers between Australian ports, a few voyages listed twice and the ships that carried boys from Parkhurst prison, and 745 voyages from overseas remain. Wikipedia’s article on convicts in Australia says “about 164,000 convicts were transported to the Australian colonies between 1788 and 1868 onboard 806 ships”, so the lists hold 92% of the ships.

World map with the convict voyages drawn as a thick braid of coloured lines leaving the British Isles, running south through the Atlantic towards Brazil, east past the Cape of Good Hope and across the Southern Ocean to Australia, where they split to Fremantle in gold, Hobart in red, Sydney in blue and Norfolk Island in green. A thinner set of lines runs from Calcutta, Madras, Ceylon, Mauritius and Singapore across the Indian Ocean. Circles mark the ports, the largest green ones at Cork and Dublin and grey ones at London and Portsmouth
Every convict voyage from overseas in Wikipedia’s lists, 1788 to 1868, drawn on the usual sailing route of the time. The lists give the port and the colony, not the track.

The flood after Waterloo

The first years were slow: 30 voyages in the 1790s and 32 in the 1800s, while Britain was fighting France. Then the war ended, and the ships came. Between 1815 and 1840 the lists hold 567 arrivals, 76% of the whole. The busiest year was 1833, with 35, and the 1830s saw 264, more than one a fortnight.

Stacked bar chart of convict ship arrivals per year from 1788 to 1868. A handful a year in blue for New South Wales until about 1814, then a steep rise to between 20 and 35 a year through the 1820s and 1830s with red Van Diemen's Land bars on top, peaking at 35 in 1833. After 1840 the bars collapse to a few red and green ones, and from 1850 to 1868 a low row of gold bars for Western Australia
Convict ships arriving from overseas, by year and colony.

Then the traffic moved. New South Wales stopped taking convicts in 1840, and from 1841 to 1849 the lists hold 16 arrivals in Van Diemen’s Land, 10 at Norfolk Island and just 5 in Sydney. Transportation to Van Diemen’s Land ended in 1853. Western Australia, which asked for convicts to build its colony, took 43 shiploads between 1850 and 1868. The last of them, Hougoumont, reached Fremantle on 9 January 1868.

Cork, London and Portsmouth

Most ships left from the Thames or the Solent. But the single busiest port in the lists is Cork, with 101 voyages, ahead of Portsmouth and London; Dublin had 51. Irish ports account for 163 of the 627 voyages from Britain and Ireland, 26%, and almost all of them went to Sydney: 34% of New South Wales’s ships from the British Isles were Irish. Another 101 voyages sailed from India, Ceylon, Mauritius or Singapore. Where the tables give numbers these carried only a handful of convicts each, some of them what the notes call “military convicts”.

Horizontal bar chart of the busiest ports of departure. Cork leads with 101 voyages in green, just ahead of Portsmouth with 100 and London with 92 in grey, then England with no port given 62, Dublin 51, Sheerness 45, Calcutta 42 in orange, the Downs 41, Plymouth 36 and Mauritius 33. A note says Irish ports supplied 26% of the voyages from Britain and Ireland, 34% of New South Wales's and 6% of Van Diemen's Land's
The ports the convict ships sailed from. Green: Ireland; grey: England; orange: India and the Indian Ocean.

From 252 days to 89

The lists don’t say when ships left, but the tables of the first three fleets and the articles on some individual ships do. For 53 voyages I have both dates. The first three fleets took a median of 190 days, and Lady Juliana, the Second Fleet’s women’s ship, took 309. By the 1820s and 1830s the median was 115 days. The fastest in the sample was Scindian, the first convict ship to Western Australia, in 89 days in 1850.

Scatter chart of voyage length in days against year. Blue squares for the fleets of 1788 to 1791 sit between 127 and 309 days, with Lady Juliana highest at 309. Circles for later voyages drop to between about 95 and 165 days in the 1810s to 1830s, and two gold points for Western Australian ships around 1850 and 1868 sit at about 90 days. Horizontal lines mark the medians: 190, 164, 115 and 90 days
How long the voyage took, where both dates are known.

The Second Fleet

The worst voyages were among the first. The Second Fleet’s contractors were paid a flat fee for every convict they took on board, “whether they landed alive or not”. Of the 1,038 convicts embarked, 273 died during the voyage, 26%, and 486 landed sick. On the Third Fleet a year later, 182 of 2,067 died at sea, 8.8%. On the 24 later voyages whose ship articles give the numbers, 37 of 4,765 convicts died, 0.8%. Shipwreck remained a danger: when Amphitrite went down at the start of her voyage, 108 women convicts and 12 children drowned.

Bar chart of the share of embarked convicts who died at sea. The Second Fleet as a whole is the longest bar at 26%. The eleven ships of the Third Fleet follow, from 14% on Britannia and 12% on Active and Admiral Barrington down to 3% on HMS Gorgon and Salamander. A short green bar for 24 later voyages shows 0.8%
Convicts who died at sea: the Second Fleet, each ship of the Third Fleet, and later voyages whose ship articles give the numbers.

One in seven

About 24,000 of the convicts, one in seven, were women, and some 80% of them had been convicted of theft, usually petty. The lists rarely say who a ship carried, so I can only identify 20 women’s voyages from them. A table in Wikipedia’s article on convict women shows how the balance changed in New South Wales: women were 26% of the convicts in 1788 and 12% in 1841. Western Australia took no women at all.

Two-part chart. Top: a red line of the women's share of convicts in New South Wales, 26% in 1788, between 19% and 25% to 1805, then falling to 11% in 1819 and 9% in 1828 and 1836 before 12% in 1841. Bottom: stacked bars of male and female convicts, tiny until 1805 and rising to about 28,000 in 1836, mostly men
The convict population of New South Wales by sex, in the years Wikipedia’s article on convict women gives.

Somebody’s land

None of these ships landed on empty country. Wikipedia’s article on penal transportation puts it plainly: violent conflict on the Australian frontier between Indigenous Australians and the colonists “began only months after the First Fleet landed, lasting over a century”. Convicts were on both sides of it. Some were killed on the frontier, some took part in killings such as the Myall Creek massacre, and in the Hawkesbury and Nepean Wars a group of Irish convicts joined the Eora, Gandangara, Dharug and Tharawal nations fighting the colonists.

Not only Britain

Australia was Britain’s second destination. Before the American Revolution, convicts went to Virginia and Maryland, “commonly accepted” to be 30,000 people, with estimates up to 120,000. France shipped more than 80,000 to the Devil’s Island system in French Guiana between 1852 and 1953, and about 22,000 to New Caledonia. Russia sent convicts to katorga in Siberia and set up a penal colony on Sakhalin in 1857. British India sent prisoners of the 1857 rebellion to the Andaman Islands, where the Cellular Jail later held independence activists; the penal settlement closed in 1947.

World map of other penal transportation systems. Purple circles mark British America on the Chesapeake, French Guiana and New Caledonia, sized by the numbers sent, and rings mark Bermuda, the Andaman Islands, Sakhalin and Siberia where no total is given. The largest circle, at Sydney, is Australia. Grey lines show the Australian convict routes
Penal transportation around the world, with the numbers Wikipedia’s articles state.

How I did this

Everything comes from English Wikipedia, saved in 2026 with revision numbers: the four colony lists of convict ships, the tables in the First, Second and Third Fleet articles, 305 convict ship articles, and the articles on convicts in Australia, penal transportation and the other penal colonies. I count a voyage from overseas once, by its year of arrival. Convict numbers, departure dates and deaths come from the Western Australia and Norfolk Island tables, the fleet tables and sentences in ship articles, kept only where the article’s arrival date matches the list. The lists give numbers of convicts for only 108 voyages, so I don’t add them up to a national total; Wikipedia’s own figure is about 162,000. The routes on the map are stylised sailing tracks, not logged ones. The paper sets out every decision.

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Read the paper
Data and code

Notes and sources

Tristan Hotham

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