Quote Originally Posted by McClef View Post
I may be wrong, but another thing about transportation, at least for some, meant that you could never return without incurring the death penalty.

Remember Magwitch in Great Expectations? Played so admirably by the great Scots actor Finlay Currie in the David Lean version!
This is an interesting site about transportation and although it mainly concerns Irish people to Australia it does cover general transportation policy. Interesting also to see how trivial some of the reasons for transportation were such as vagrancy.
http://www.nationalarchives.ie/topic...n/transp1.html