461 AN OFFICIAL ESTIMATE OF TRANSPORTATION. The following extract from an official letter, beaxing date 29 1787 January, 1787, written by Duncan Campbell, superintendeoi ot the convicts on the river Thames, for the information of the Government, famishes a basis for calculating the number sent annually to America : — It appears by a calculation I made for the information of the House of Commons some years since, that, upon an average of Number seven years — from 1769 to 1775, both inclusive — I transported five JJJJ,'ujiiy hundi'ed and forty-seven convicts annuaUy from London, Middlesex, in seven Bucks, and the four counties of the Home Circuit, and that one ^'*"* hundred and seventeen of those transports were women. I always looked upon the number from the other parts of the Kingdom to be equal to what was transported by me. According to this estimate, the number of convicts transported annually to the American colonies during the period referred to was about one thousand one hundred. PR. LANG'S ESTIMATE.
- ' It is no longer possible to ascertain with any degree of accuracy
the number of convicts transported to the West Indies and the American colonies previous to the war of American Independence. During the publication of the Encyclop^die M^thodiquSy in the year 1785, the article Eiata Unis was submitted by its author, M. Jefferwn Meusnier, to the President Jefferson, who was then American Senrf? Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of Prance ; and in reference ^^^^ to this class of persons, to which the French editor had alluded as P®^*^ one of the three classes that peopled America, Jefferson supplied him with the following remarks [quoted ante, p. 19] : — " It is pretty evident, from the tenor of these observations, that this was by no means a favourite subject with the worthy Plenipo- tentiary, whose native patriotism, as well as his laudable desire to make his countrymen stand as well as possible with their good allies, doubtless induced him to throw a little American dust in the eyes of the French encyclopsedist. For while he would induce the reader, at the commencement of his remarks, to believe that not more than two thousand English convicts had ever been trans- Baaiaof ported to America altogether, he intimates at the close of them that ^*'^*^^°' this estimate referred to the colony of Virginia alone, the comparison which he institutes beiug made with the population of that colony at the commencement of the war, and not with that of the United States generally. Digitized by Google
