Tag: Crime and punishment
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Transported: every convict ship to Australia, mapped
Britain shipped about 162,000 convicts to Australia. I mapped all 745 voyages in Wikipedia’s ship lists: the busiest port was Cork, the busiest year 1833, and the Second Fleet lost a quarter of its convicts at sea.
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Pirate hotspots, then and now
I mapped 7,511 pirate attacks from 1993 to 2020 and followed the hotspots as they moved, from the Strait of Malacca to Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea. In 2025 the busiest pirate waters were the Singapore Strait, and in 2026 Somali hijackers are back.
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Crime in London, 1674 to 1913: the Old Bailey mapped
197,581 trials at the Old Bailey, rebuilt from the tagged record: the gallows give way to transportation and then the prison, women fall from 36% of defendants to 10%, and a map of where the crimes were, 1674 to 1834.
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Gallows Hill: where Britain put its execution places
I measured 340 Gallows and Gibbet names on the OS map against fifty ordinary places each. They sit near towns but outside them, beside main roads, on low rises rather than high hills; the boundary story is faint.
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Cold years, witch years? Scotland’s witch panics and the Little Ice Age
Scotland accused 3,840 people of witchcraft between 1563 and 1736, 57% of them in five sudden panics. I mapped where they lived and tested whether the panics followed cold years. They did not.
