‘Ne’er-do-well sly scoundrels’ populate her pages, such as John Kittenridge, ‘known to the good citizens of Chelmsford, Essex, by the pseudonym Flashey Dick’ and ‘Martha Ingleston, known to the ne’er-do-wells of London – and the watch – as Gallows Pat …’ Not a few of them live near the docks, ‘where seamen, prostitutes, swindlers and other lowlifes eked out a sorry existence’. ‘On 9 April 1774, on a proverbial dark and stormy night’, members of Patrick Madan’s ‘gang were out and predictably up to no good’. Before the year was out, Madan and ‘no less than twelve of his partners in crime’ had been thrown into Newgate prison. No sooner were they off the street than ‘plenty of other ne’er-do-wells had been found to take their places’: men such as ‘William Deadman and William Marshall, old partners in crime’; William Richardson and mugger Henry Horne, along with ‘their partners in crime, Alexander Kennedy and William Maynard’; not to mention Charles Thompson ‘with his young partners in crime’.

In the venerable literary tradition of painting the eighteenth century as quaintly wicked and fun, Christopher presents criminal celebrities as so many Mack the Knifes, whose adoring gangs are constantly ‘regaling newcomers with tales of their leader’s derring-do’. Likewise, British officers raising troops during the American Revolution dream ‘of triumph, riches and the grateful adoration of their countrymen for their derring-do’.

At other times, Christopher slips into more up-to-date idiom, not always with happy results. In the late 1770s, she tells us, ‘the loss of the American colonies caused the British penal system to go into meltdown’, as though the hulks loaded with prisoners on the Thames were the equivalent of the Three Mile Island or Chernobyl nuclear catastrophes. During the Gordon Riots of 1780, ‘slowly, like a bleeding wound, Newgate spilled out its constricted guts’, as prisoners seized their opportunity to make a break. She further exposes her shaky grasp of medical science by contending that the ‘pale fleshy bodies which arrived’ in West Africa ‘straight from colder climes, previously so infrequently exposed to sunlight, provided tasty temptation to the swarms of mosquitoes which plagued the area’ – suggesting quite erroneously that tanned and black bodies got fewer bites.

Far more comfortable on her home ground of the Old Bailey sessions, the author excels in painstakingly reconstructing the lives of convicted criminals from newspapers and court records. Some she manages to follow from adolescent escapades through a lifetime of court appearances, capital sentences, prison breaks and sea voyages all the way to Australia. Unashamedly and refreshingly positivist in her approach, Christopher accepts what she reads in the documents as fact. In the ‘what’ of history, she is a master craftsman.

She is much less convincing when writing about the ‘why’. The book proposes to argue that the loss of the American colonies as a destination for transported convicts inspired the British government to conduct a convict experiment in West Africa, whose failure led to the consideration of Australia as the alternative penal colony. After the Americans closed their ports to the contractors who had previously delivered British convicts to be farmed out as labourers,

Britons decided that transportation itself was not a flawed policy; rather, a new destination was needed. The answer was a whole new colony.

So those in power started flicking through old maps and atlases, then sorting through correspondence from colonial officials, looking for outposts of British power they had forgotten or overlooked. Where could they despatch those sentenced to transportation? And as they searched, a potential answer was right there under their noses, beside the vellum ledgers and the burgundy leather-bound tomes. Back in 1771 … William Eden had suggested in his book Principles of Penal Law that convicts could be used to man forts in Africa. Africa, dreadful, deadly Africa, would become Britain’s new hope … Whitehall’s mandarins chose to overlook the failures of the original scheme and see it as a hatchling whose day had finally come.

Who these Whitehall mandarins were we are not told. Who said Africa was Britain’s new hope, and when? That too remains a mystery. The two paragraphs outlining the supposed dusted-off plan for a penal colony are not referenced. The pages that follow do not document a plan for a penal settlement, but rather, various schemes that had been proposed for turning the Senegambia region of the sub-Saharan western Atlantic coast into a worthwhile colony after Charles O’Hara was appointed governor in 1766. None of those included the founding of a penal establishment for transported convicts previously dispatched to America. Certainly, some convict soldiers were used to man the garrisons, but that was a venerable practice, dating, as Christopher tells us, back to the War of the Spanish Succession at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Senegambia was not proposed as a dumping ground for civilian convicts.

So what exactly was the ‘convict disaster’ in Africa that forms the core of the book? It consists of three quite separate and distinct episodes. The first concerns two regiments raised for service during the American Revolution, when Britain was plunged into a worldwide conflict against France, Spain and the Netherlands. The War Office decided that this would be a good occasion to attack enemy forts on the West African Coast. Two hapless regimental commanders had commenced recruiting in early 1781, hoping to see action in America. Instead, they found themselves in West Africa in January 1782, where one promptly succumbed to a deadly fever. The other, Kenneth Mackenzie, proved to be an incompetent and criminally callous leader. He failed in his attempt to take the Dutch stronghold of Elmina, illegally seized neutral shipping, turned his guns on friendly Fante villages, and executed a mutinous convict soldier by strapping him across the mouth of a canon and blowing him to kingdom come. Barely a year after arriving in Africa, Mackenzie was relieved of his command and sent home to be tried for murder. Both regiments were disbanded. The link to the author’s theme is that a number of convicts sentenced to transportation served in the ill-fated regiments, although Christopher, who is irritatingly vague on figures, does not say how many. As far as her overarching argument is concerned, the vital point is that the Home Office had nothing to do with hatching the plan to send regiments to West Africa. It was War Office business, not an attempt to find an alternative destination to America for convicts sentenced to transportation.

The scene was set for the second, quite unconnected, episode when, in 1781, British judges for the first time sentenced convicted criminals to be transported to an unspecified place in Africa. In 1782 some forty of them arrived at Gorée Island, off the coast of Senegal, with no clear plan laid down for their disposal. The Company of Merchants managing the British slave trade had agreed to take only seventeen; the fate of the others remains unclear. Most of those who did enter Company service were dead inside a year. Finally, early in 1785 the Home Office engaged a private contractor to land a further twenty-two convicts in West Africa. Within a few months of their arrival, disease had done for practically all of them.

While each episode deserves to be called disastrous, taken together, they do not constitute ‘Britain’s convict disaster in Africa’. They involved perhaps two hundred wretched souls. None was connected with the foundation of a penal colony. A couple of privately sponsored schemes which did aspire to find appropriate spots for penal settlements in Africa failed before they got off the ground – one quashed by a parliamentary enquiry, the other sunk by a failure to find an appropriate port in Southwest Africa.

Lacking evidence for her main thesis, Christopher pads out the book with material unrelated to convicts in Africa. Some concerns private contractors who took on shiploads of convicts hoping to offload them in North or Central America. Another story revolves around the brutality of Joseph Wall, who had charge of the garrison at Gorée up until a few months before the forty transported convicts arrived there in 1782. He had been relieved of his command and committed for trial because he had punished allegedly insubordinate soldiers (not, it would seem, convict soldiers) by lashing – not by the ordained cat o’ nine tails, but an ordinary heavy rope. Two, who had been sentenced to 800 lashes, died as a result.

Again, Christopher applies her formidable research skills in following Wall’s attempts to cheat the gallows, following him to Bath, Scotland and the Continent over a twenty-year period. The case fascinated British public opinion at the time and has been the subject of previous studies. Its illumination of brutality in army discipline retains its ability to shock even modern readers used to scenes of Abu Ghraib and water boarding. But what it has to do with convict transportation or the foundation of Australia is hard to see. The same goes for the contrast between the royal pardon eventually granted to Kenneth Mackenzie in 1785 and Wall’s execution in 1802. Christopher’s non explanation is that ‘Britain in 1802 was a different place from 1785’.

She brings her book to a close with a bit of sleight of hand, characterising Sir Joseph Banks’s 1785 recommendation that Australia be settled by convicts as ‘more outlandish’ than proposals for landing them on the African coast or India. Yet Banks was a far more substantial figure than any of the competing schemers and dreamers. A royal favourite, president of the Royal Society and someone who had actually visited the site of his proposed penal colony, he possessed ready access to the world of officialdom. It was not as though he lacked the capacity to compare the relative potential of Africa and Australia. He had already begun discussing plans for exploring the interior of West Africa with the friends who would join him in founding the African Association in 1788. Finally, the plan of Australian colonisation differed in quality and magnitude from anything that had gone before in Africa or America. Instead of the old contracting-out system of disposing of convicts, the state took charge. Naval vessels did the transporting and the Colonial Office set up a system of governance – quite unlike anything that had previously been seen on the deadly palm-fringed coasts of Africa.