"Making a Botany Bay of the United States": Enslaved Convicts from the Caribbean and Illegal Slave Trading into the United States after 1808

In January 1818, Captain John Henley wrote a concerning letter to the U.S. Secretary of the Navy. Henley had detained the Neptune, an English brig docked at Amelia Island, for violation of the slave trade act. In addition to a small quantity of rum, on board were “eight convict slaves, sentenced to transportation for various offenses.” The letter transmitted information respecting the illegal importation of the enslaved into the United States; it also served as a warning. Henley was concerned that those on board were not only enslaved people imported in violation of the 1808 slave trade abolition act but also convicts, charging that the ship captain, cleared from a Jamaican port, sought to “make a Botany Bay of the United States,” referencing the English use of Botany Bay (New South Wales) as a penal colony. The vessel's arrival was not an isolated incident. In the spring of 1820, soon after the execution of the treaty ceding Florida to the United States, another British schooner from Jamaica entered East Florida carrying on board seventeen “negro slaves; that were of bad character, and understood to be convicts, who had been shipped for their crimes.”

This paper explores the entangled systems of intercolonial slave trading and convict transportation after both the British and the United States made the transatlantic trade in slaves illegal. Focusing on instances of enslaved people sentenced “to be sold and transported” from the island of Jamaica and sent to Spanish Florida at a time when imperial boundaries were in flux, the paper highlights two main points. First, how the punitive journeys of convicted enslaved people from Jamaica mapped onto the intercolonial trade networks. Second, the enslaved used the uncertainty and messiness of empire and abolition as an opportunity to challenge their forced entrance into the intercolonial slave trade.