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What is stopping the "captain" from taking a little detour to the English country side, better yet, New Zealand, and kidnapping a few farmers?
by mahmud 16y ago
What is stopping the "captain" from taking a little detour to the English country side, better yet, New Zealand, and kidnapping a few farmers?
- jeffesp 16y agoA sealed record of the number of prisoners on departure.
- mahmud 16y agoThat doesn't really stop him from the recreational murder of X prisoners, and replenishing his inventory with X Kiwis before heading to Parramatta :-) (I have the Australia Almanac and it's full of interesting tidbits. One of them was when I read "The English met with the Aborigines during a time of hunger .. 5 men where eaten". I shook my head briefly at the inhumanity and went on to read .. then paused, and re-read the passage again. Turns out, the English ate the Aborigines.)
- hugh3 16y agoGot a reference for that? The history of precisely who killed whom in British/Aboriginal relations is pretty well studied, and I've never heard of any cannibalism on either side. Whether the Aborigines ever engaged in cannibalism was a somewhat fraught political topic in Australia a few years ago. (The answer is "probably someone got eaten by somebody at some point in the 40,000 year history of the thousands of Aborginal tribes, but you're not supposed to talk about it.") Anyway, the story isn't about captains "recreationally murdering" prisoners, which is the kind of thing that only a tiny number of psychopaths would do. It's just about them failing to take quite as much care of them in terms of food, water and medical treatment as they really should have.
- mahmud 16y agoHeh. I said right there "Australia Almanac". It's a popular book in Aus, and have seen it in a few places. It chronicles Australia from the stone ages to late 80s (at least my old copy does.) As for cannibalism, my profile info has been a passing reference to it, in jest; it doesn't concern me at all, at least not until the zombie apocalypse (if food rations run low, I might have to hunt a few zombies and raid the mall shops for flat-screens and warm Heineken!)
- jeffesp 16y agoAlthough I am sure there is the opportunity for this kind of depravity among sea captains, for the majority of them it was probably a crime of convenience. It is easy to say "he is a criminal, let him die." It is much more difficult to say "I am going to take a free man from his life in order to make an incremental amount more in my business."
- philwelch 16y agoNot just the number, but a manifest of prisoners, so they can't be treated as fungible with other people.
- mahmud 16y agoHow do you create a manifest of people without photos, finger prints or genetic testing? The wealthiest and most powerful families of that era, or any time before 20th century, had difficulty identifying kins and heirs. The whole study of Genealogy (and, perhaps the institution of marriage!) was created for the secure identification of blood relatives and safe transfer of property. Even visual identification is spotty when IDing strangers.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- moultano 16y agoProbably not worth the hassle. I guess that's the danger of setting the incentive too high. :)
- pavel_lishin 16y agoI imagine it's pretty risky, since the local farmers would presumably have weapons, and know the land better than the captain.
- mahmud 16y agoGood point. Plus, historically, at the time, New Zealand was not a penal colony like Australia. But home to the English gentry.
- cullenking 16y agoEh, lookup the term shanghaied - be good at buying people drinks and voila, free money!
- astine 16y agoThe fact that is would be an incredibly stupid thing to do? Kidnapping English citizens was a capital offense and piracy doubly so. If they started doing this routinely, they would have been hunted down by the Royal Navy. I doubt many merchant captains had the forces necessary to kidnap large numbers of people anyway. Besides, It would have been much faster and more profitable to just go straight to Van Diemen's Land and drop off the 'cargo.'
- mahmud 16y agoTo take my sophistry to its logical conclusion (at least I am admitting it :-) wouldn't this be only an specific solution for the Australia instance? can we apply this "rule" to the transport of, say, refugees? All I am saying is, counting the cargo is not the most ideal solution for the Murdering Captain problem. Sometimes you might even get willing participants. Say, a ship paid to transport 100 Cubans to the U.S for political asylum might just be better off bringing 100, paying Costa Ricans (ignoring linguistic identification :-) I have an academic interest in this because I have been a refugee escaping on a boat, helped by traffickers to leave Somalia. And also, because I have an interest in the accurate identification of undocumented individuals (with their active participation, of course; adversarial identification is something better left to Langley)
- tomjen3 16y agoI for one would love to read your story of escaping Somalia.
- mahmud 16y agoOh, it's a unique fascinating personal tale that I just happen to share with another 4 million people :-) Survival stories are not worth telling if they're widely shared and experienced. In fact, there are people in New Orleans who have had it worse than us. Because of that, I prefer to be silent, and grateful.
- tomjen3 16y agoPrison (a horrible place, especially in those times) and a quick trial then the gallows. All in all a pretty high negative incentive (which it had to be, to keep starving people from committing crimes).
- pavel_lishin 16y agoPrison didn't keep all the other inmates in there out. :)
- hugh3 16y agoThere was always a Royal Navy presence on the convict ships, even if the ships were privately hired. Why? Well, apart from the possibility you mentioned (which is unlikely -- just you try committing piracy on British soil in the 19th Century in a ship with its name and identifying information written on the back), there was presumably the possibility that a captain might let a prisoner escape in exchange for money. Also there's the problem of maintaining security on the prisons. And finally, I'm sure there was a constant need to cycle guards as well as prisoners back and forth from Britain to the colonies.
- mseebach 16y agoI think the point was that it wasn't actually that difficult to keep the prisoners alive once the incentives lined up.