Penal Colonies: How Exiled Convicts Built Empires and Redrew the Map

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Until 1984, Colombia's Gorgona Island prison needed no walls. The jungle interior was full of venomous snakes, and the 30 kilometers of water to the mainland was a feeding ground for sharks. This episode treats the penal colony as one of history's most durable tools of statecraft: a way to remove unwanted people, put them to work on a hostile frontier, and keep them beyond the reach of ordinary law. Britain made it a system with the Transportation Act of 1717, contracting merchants to ship convicts across the Atlantic and auction them to planters as seven year servants.

When the American Revolution closed that route, British jails overflowed into rotting prison hulks on the Thames, and the government looked to the far side of the world. The First Fleet sailed in 1787, and roughly 162,000 convicts followed between 1788 and 1868, clearing the land and building the roads of colonial Australia. Elsewhere the purpose darkened from extraction to elimination, and the same logic stretches from Alexander the Great to Siberia and Robben Island.

Between 1718 and 1776 an estimated 30,000 convicts were sent to the American colonies, mostly to Maryland and Virginia.
Australia's convict ranks included about 3,600 political prisoners, among them the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Luddites, and Irish nationalists.
France sent some 80,000 people to Devil's Island between 1852 and 1939. With mortality reaching 75 percent, it was called the Dry Guillotine.
Alexander the Great used Bactria as a place of exile, and 18 percent of modern Peshawar's population is said to carry Greek genetic markers.
In the 1830s Hawaii's King Kamehameha III replaced the death penalty with exile, sending men to Kahoolawe and women to Lanai.

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