In 1584 Richard Hakluyt, drawing attention to ‘the many thousands of idle persons’ within the realm, ‘whereby all the prisons of the land are daily pestered and stuffed full of them where either they pitifully pine away or else at length are miserably hanged’, recommended that ‘these petty thieves might be condemned for certain years in the western parts’ in sawing and felling of timber and ‘in the more southern parts’ in planting sugar canes and gathering cotton. England was full and overflowing with the workless; the New World was empty and eager for workers. Emptying the former and filling the latter was to the benefit of both. The indolent would become industrious. Prosperity would replace poverty. Everyone would be a winner. It was this beguiling argument that would sustain transportation throughout its history from the beginning of the seventeenth century to America until the middle of the nineteenth to Australia.

England's, and later Britain's, expansion overseas made this suggestion possible. As early as 1598 an Act ‘for the punishment of rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’ sanctioned it, along with many other measures. ‘Incorrigible rogues’ were to be banished the realm ‘and at the charge of [the] country shall be conveyed unto such parts beyond the seas as shall be … for that purpose assigned by the Privy Council’. To return without licence was death.