Poor Elizabeth Beckford. She was 70 years old and her crime was stealing 12lb of Gloucester cheese.
For that she could have hanged. Hundreds did in those violent, vengeful days, dancing "the Tyburn frisk" in the words of those who crammed around the gallows to watch this favourite spectator sport of the 18th century. But the state, in its mercy, saved her life - and gave her a punishment that some would see as worse than death.
She was an unwilling passenger on a fleet of 11 ships that set out from England in 1787, the first of the convoys of the criminal underclass - as the ruling elite of Georgian England saw them - sent in chains to colonise new and dangerous shores on the other side of the world.
