Empire_pt3_Layout 1 29/03/2012 16:33 Page 181
CHAPTER 10 Crisis and Mutiny
M
ost British colonies were founded by private enterprise and defended by the help, however distant, of the Royal Navy.
Potential naval bases such as Gibraltar and Minorca were often taken by the navy itself, but Australia was a unique case in several ways. Many reasons were put forward for colonising the continent, most of them maritime.
This project of a settlement in that quarter has appeared in many Proteus-like form, sometimes as a halfway house to China, again as a check on the Spaniards at Manila and their Acapulco trade; sometimes as a place for transported convicts; then as a place of Asylum for American refugees; and sometimes as an Emporium for supplying our Marine Yards with Hemp and Cordage or for carrying on the fur trade on the N.W. Coast of America …12 But it was the convict problem that caused the government to take action. It was no longer possible to send prisoners to the American colonies. They could instead be kept in hulks – old warships moored near the Royal Dockyards where the convicts could carry out hard labour – but these were becoming grossly
181