Talk:Penal transportation

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If this section is maintained by the Australian portal, then it's perhaps unsurprising that there's a strong bias towards convicts being shipped to Australia, and a lesser extent to the American colonies. But, with th abolition of the Slave trade in the British Empire coming up to celebrate its bicentenary, transportation to the sugar plantations of the West Indies has never been more relevant, more potentially controversial.. or more IGNORED. I've lived most of my life in and around the port of Bristol, in SW England. I attended Colston's Primary School - named (as with many Bristol institutions) after a former slave trader who gave generously to charitable causes. But Bristol was ALSO the setting for the notorious "Bloody Assize" of Judge Jefferies, who hanged hundreds of (alleged) participants in the "Pitchfork Rebellion"... but transported rather more of them to The West Indies. One of them - a doctor from Monmouth named Peter Blood - escaped and found fame as "Captain Blood", the pirate. My point is a simple one: Yes slavery was a BAD thing. But African slaves were seeming treated no worse than white tranportees had been not long before. I'm invited to feel guilty for benefiting from the one... but the other seems simply to have been swept under the carpet.

Note how mention here in Wikipedia (qv) of Jefferies' transportations to the colonies is covered by a single line... and WHICH colonies gets no mention at all. It's kind of like mentioning the Nazi Death camps without ANY reference to any of the (many) non-Jewish victims. That's kind of insulting to the memories of the Homosexuals, Communists, Freemasons, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses... Transportation to Australia may have been harsh... but not compared with transportation to a sugar plantation in the West Indies: that was like being moved to Death Row - regardless of your skin colour, race or creed. BigRonW 23:56, 21 March 2007 (UTC)