Includes index, notes and bibliographical references. Originally published in 1959, 'The Convict Ships' has been accepted by historians and scholars as the standard work on the subject. This Australian edition, which follows the revised and enlarged second edition (1969), includes the results of research into hundreds of journal of ships' surgeons in an authoritative and fascinating account of this little-known field of maritime history.

A great human document, which must fascinate everyone interested in ships and the sea, it tells for the first time the strange and often macabre story of the transport of prisoners from Britain to Australia between the years 1787 and 1868. From authoritative sources, official and unofficial, Charles Bateson reconstructs not only the voyages themselves, but also the administrative system under which the ships were selected, manned, provisioned and despatched with their miserable human freight to face a 13,000 miles voyage over tempestuous and largely uncharted seas.

It is a history which has many dark and sombre hues - a story of hardship and human suffering, of disease and callous brutality, of mutiny and shipwreck, of cowardice and courage.

The scope of the work has been confined to those vessels which conveyed prisoners from England and Ireland.