September 22, 2014 • 33 mins
Great Britain didn't only send criminals to Australia as punishment; they also wanted to colonize the continent. But to do that, they had to send women in addition to men. This plan involved some unsettling facts, and had some unexpected consequences. Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome. I'm Tracy Wilson
and I'm Holly Frying. And today's episode I did not
mean to be a weird counterpoint to our episode on
(00:23):
the King's Daughters for the Fia du Bloch, but it is.
It's a weird counterpart to that episode. That was the
episode where uh, they needed more women in the new
colonies in Canada and so they rounded them up and
sent them there. This is sort of the same story,
(00:44):
but the women were not going voluntarily because they were
in fact prisoners. They were convicts. So, as we probably
all know, Great Britain used to use the continent of
Australia as a pane colony and consequently the first European
resident of Australia were mostly male and mostly criminals, and
(01:04):
really unsurprisingly this caused quite a lot of problems, and
the people in charge decided pretty much immediately, as in
before the first ships of the first Fleet turned around
to go back to England, that they needed to do
something about it. And that's where the transport ship known
as the Lady Juliana comes in. And while the King's
(01:27):
daughters worked pretty well as a plan. This plan did
not work quite as well. And in case it's not
clear from the title of this podcast, today's episode is
gonna include some pretty candid discussion of prostitution as well
as some aspects that may be disturbing to people. There
(01:49):
are some things that went on with these women that
were somewhere on the line between coerced and non consenting.
So just we get letters sometimes from parents who asks,
who asked why we did not give them a heads up.
So here is your heads up, parents and teachers. There
(02:09):
is some more adult content in this younger historians, maybe
not for them or if you're just really sensitive to
those kind of topics. Right, And it's also this is
a listener request from listener Connie, and it sounded in
the request a little more like a fun party time
than it actually is. Yes, So, in case you did
(02:30):
not know, Great Britain actually had a few reasons to
want to colonize Australia, which at the time was referred
to as New South Wales. And this was towards the
end of the seventeen hundreds, and a big reason was
to relieve the overcrowding in the prisons that were in Britain.
In the late eighteenth century, Britain's prison system was strained
to the breaking point thanks to a population boom. There
(02:51):
was also widespread poverty and a penal code that was
so strict that reformers called it quote the bloody Code.
The number of capital offenses on the books during this
period had quadrupled, and people were being sentenced to death
for crimes that, to today's eyes seemed extremely minor. It
also didn't help that the trial process was really skewed
(03:13):
in favor of the prosecution. Usually everything happened so quickly
that often the defendant did not even know it was
their turn yet, and they had already been at least
found guilty, if not also sentenced. And Great Britain had
before the Revolutionary War been using the American colonies to
offload prisoners, ultimately transporting fifty thousand prisoners to the colonies
(03:37):
before the war ended, but once the United States became independent,
that option was no longer available to Great Britain. And
just because people send us pedantic emails about this all
the time, at some points during that history Great in
Britain with Great Britain was not Great Britain yet it
was just England. Yeah, but it became great Britain during
the window. Please do not send us the then diagram anymore. Um.
(04:03):
Penal colonies also had another purpose besides just serving as prisons.
A transportation sentence was basically involuntary relocation and involuntary servitude.
The prisoners provided forced labor for British colonial interests for
the terms of their sentence, which was usually seven or
fourteen years, or sometimes for the rest of their lives.
(04:25):
Prisoner transportation also provided a long term population for the colony.
While people technically could return home once they'd finished their sentence,
it was really taken for granted that almost all of
them would stay and no one would be coming back.
So once you served your time, you'd have to save
up enough money to actually afford your passage back. That
(04:46):
was not an automatic trip, uh And even if you
could save up the money to make the voyage, you'd
have to endure an uncomfortable multi month trip to get
back to Europe. And of course people who had started
families while they were transported would either have to pay
or relocate them as well, or they would have to
leave them behind. A reason for colonizing Australia specifically was
(05:09):
so that Great Britain could build up its naval presence
in that part of the Pacific and expand its empire.
So on May thirteenth of seventeen eighty seven, a fleet
of eleven ships left Portsmouth, England, bound for Australia, and
this fleet became known as the First Fleet, and it
included six convict transports and three storeships. They were accompanied
(05:32):
by two escort ships from the Royal Navy. The convicts
aboard the transports included about five hundred seventy men and
a hundred sixty women, and in terms of the total
number of passengers who were going to stay in Australia
once the ships went back to Europe, there were two
hundred and forty two women and about eleven hundred men,
as well as some children. The First Fleet arrived in
(05:55):
January of sev and started a colony at Sydney Cove
and Jackson. Sydney Cove, which later became the City of Sydney,
became the first permanent European settlement in Australia. Meanwhile, Australia's
Aboriginal population at this point was estimated to number somewhere
between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand.
(06:18):
Things went really badly at Sydney Cove basically immediately. People
were really exhausted and sick following the months long voyage
to get there, and most of the prisoners had little
to no experience in any of the skills that were
actually needed to keep a colony running. On top of that,
the soil was not right for the crops. It could
(06:39):
have been improved with animal manure, but most of the
animals that they had brought with them had died during
the voyage. They had also bought seeds to plant in
Cape Town, South Africa, and those had wound up germinating
in the hold of the ships, so they couldn't even
be planted once they got to Australia, and the vast
disparity of the sexes was causing real problems. There were
(07:02):
reports of sexual assaults, both of Aboriginal women in the
area and the female convicts who had been transported, and
it was obvious to the people running the colony that
it was not going to survive without women. Without family ties,
men were as likely as not to leave the colony
and strike out on their own once their sentences were served.
Governor Arthur Philip was also quite worried about the morality
(07:25):
and the relationships of the convicts under his charge, and
on February seventh, so not long at all after they arrived,
he gave this address um and, as it was recounted
in the seventeen eighty nine Voyages of Governor Philip to
Botany Bay quote he particularly noticed the illegal intercourse between
(07:46):
the sexes as an offense to which encouraged a general
profligacy of manners, and it was in several ways injurious
to society. To prevent this, he strongly recommended marriage, and
promised every kind of countenance and assistance to those who,
by entering into that state, should manifest their willingness to
(08:07):
conform to the laws of morality and religion. Governor Philip
concluded his address by declaring his earnest desire to promote
the happiness of all who were under his government, and
to render the settlement in New South Wales advantageous and
honorable to his country, and fourteen marriages did actually take
place the following week. However, the vast imbalance between the
(08:31):
number of men and the number of women meant that
getting married wasn't really just an option available for the
vast majority of the male convicts, and one of the
first dispatches he wrote back to Britain Governor Philip said
quite clearly got that quote. The very small proportion of
females makes the sending out of an additional number absolutely
(08:51):
necessary and this led to a plan that involved loading
a ship specifically with female convicts of child bearing age
to then to Australia to become wives. Before we talk
about exactly how they did this and who they filled
the ships with, let's take a brief moment for a
word from a sponsor stupendous, so to get back to
(09:12):
the Lady Julianna, which was also sometimes called the Lady
Julian and how they filled her with passengers. Once word
arrived in London that the penal colony in Australia needed
women prisoners, officials got to work finding ones who would suit.
They were going to be sent to Australia aboard the
second fleet of prison transports. And while there were enough
(09:35):
total women in London's prisons to do the job, many
of them were actually too old or in one way
or another not desirable as a wife. The search for
female prisoners of the right age wound up ranging all
over the country and it actually took five months to
find enough ladies. As the search was ongoing, the women
(09:55):
who had already been selected for transport had to wait
on board a prison ship, Lady Juliana, which was at
anchor in the Thames River. Some of them had to
wait in the hold of the ship for weeks or
months before it set sail, and none of them were
allowed out on the deck until the ship was at sea.
And this was like really a foul experience obviously, I
(10:17):
mean there were any imagined. Yeah, they were packed into
these type quarters in the ship. The ship's ballast was
made of this combination of sand and gravel, and where
it was located under the ship meant that it like
just soaked up everything fetted and could never be cleaned.
So the whole experience was very gross. It sounds just lurid.
(10:39):
Uh So some of these women that were in live
dealing with these conditions were those that have been sentenced
to death, but their sentences were commuted to transportation, and
these are some of them. Uh. Mary Burgess, who was
convicted for stealing a pair of sheets and a ta
chest containing money. Mary Carter had been sentenced to death
(11:01):
for three counts of shoplifting. Sarah Cowten had been sentenced
for assault and highway robbery. Elizabeth Emmons had also been
sentenced to death for three counts of shoplifting. Catherine Hayland
who was found guilty of counterfeiting coins and her sentence
(11:22):
was actually to be burned at the stake. It's also
Mary Coimes who had shoplifted thirty yards of printed linen,
and Mary Wade and Jane Whiting who had both been
convicted of highway robbery. So about these highway robberies, that
makes it sound like some women on horseback brandishing swords
(11:45):
came running up upon a carriage and and stole everything
from everyone inside by force. Right, That is not what happened.
That is the image that gets conjured. I think. So
Mary Wade and Jane Whiting, who were tried together because
they had committed the together. To quote from the records
at Old Bailey, which was where they were tried. Mary
(12:05):
Wade and Jane Whiting were indicted for foloniously assaulting Mary
Phillips on the King's Highway on the fifth of October
and putting her in fear and foloniously taking from her
person and against her will, one cotton frock, one linen tippet,
one linen cap, the property of John Forward when it
(12:26):
also gave the values of each of those things, which
were not much. So basically what they had done these
were children. They had locked another child into an outhouse
and stolen her clothes from her, and for this they
were both sentenced to death. They also severe penalty. Yeah.
They also they pawned those clothes for eighteen pence, So
(12:48):
that gives you an idea of how much this was
actually worth. And this is sort of where the information
gets a little bit startling. Uh. Mary Wade was the
youngest person aboard the Lady Juliana, and when she was tried,
she was only eleven years old. So these really were
just children, Yeah they were. They were definitely the youngest ones,
(13:09):
but a lot of the women on board were teenagers,
definitely um and not everyone viewed having their sentences commuted
as a mercy. Katholic Katherine Hayland, for example, she was
the one who was supposed to be burned at the stake.
She was one of a whole group of women who
were supposed to be executed, and they were all at
the same time offered to have their sentences commuted to transportation,
(13:31):
either for seven years or for life, and Katherine and
fifteen of the others agreed, but six of them said no,
some of them because they said they were innocent and
they were not going to make any concessions because they
weren't guilty in the first place, and others really believed
that transportation was a fate worse than death. I mean,
(13:52):
at this point there had essentially been one ship full
of prisoner or one fleet of ships full of prisoners
that had gone to Australia. It there was not really
a town there yet that people would be living in.
There were definitely Aboriginal peoples with their own societies and
their own culture, but the British viewed them with a
lot of fear and suspicion. Um so there were people
(14:13):
who would basically rather die than go there. And so
all six of these women who had refused were given
twenty four hours to think about it, after which they
refused again. And then it was only after days of
being kept on bread and water as punishment that most
of them begrudgingly changed their minds and agreed to go
to Australia. Um. There I think there was one who insisted, no,
(14:37):
you're just gonna have to hang me. I'm not gonna
do it. You can't make me. Yeah, And I'm sure
in their minds to some degree it was like a
thing where they were perceiving like, Okay, I can go
on this possibly likely horrible journey and die slow and miserable,
or I can be put to death relatively quickly. Right.
That was probably how they were weighing that out. It
(14:59):
wasn't so much that there weren't creature comforts there, but
that it looked like a pretty horrible end to come to. Yes. Uh.
Most of the women that were sent aboard the Lady Juliana, though,
were sentenced to transportation from the outset. It was not
a case of a reduced sentence. So some examples of
the women and crimes that got them uh sentenced to
(15:21):
transportation included Jane Wieldon, who was sentenced for stealing a
silk handkerchief from a shop. Mary Winspear had been sentenced
to transportation for stealing three men's hats, Rosamund Dale for
stealing goods with a value of five pounds, and Sarah
Acton for stealing ten live suckling pigs. Some of the
(15:44):
women who were brought aboard the Lady Juliana for transport
also had their babies with them, children that have been
born during imprisonment, and some of these women's husbands were
also on second fleet transport on one of the ships
carrying men and the end a second fleet wound up
with four prison transport ships and two store ships. The
other three transport ships mostly carried men, and on the
(16:08):
Lady Julianna. As we said before, all of the prisoners
were women. The Lady Julianna left on July twenty nine nine,
and they were roughly two hundred and forty five women aboard,
but their records are actually pretty sketchy. There are women
known to have escaped before the ship departed who were
never stricken from the manifest, and there were others that
(16:30):
were known to be aboard that were never added to
the manifest in the first place. Even though the whole
experience was pretty filthy and foul, the conditions on the
Lady Julianna were much better than on the other prison transports.
The women were allowed up on deck For the most part,
they had enough food to eat and water to drink.
They also had a surgeon on board to see to
(16:52):
their medical needs, and they were supplied with cloth and
needles and threads to make shirts, which would then be
sold when they got support. The other ships were an
entirely different matter. From a letter from w Hill to
Jonathan Waltham Esquire written in July, quote, the irons used
(17:13):
upon these unhappy wretches were barbarous. The contractors had been
in the Guinea trade and had put on board the
same shackles used by them in that trade, which are
made with a short bolt instead of chains, that dropped
between the legs and fastened with a bandage about the waist,
like those at the different galals. Those bolts were not
more than three quarters of a foot in length, so
(17:34):
that they could not extend either leg from the other
more than an inch or two at most. Thus fettered,
it was impossible for them to move, but at the
risk of both their legs being broken. So if you
are not familiar with the term guinea trade and haven't
put that together from contacts, he's basically saying this is
a slaving ship, but as transporting these prisoners and the
(17:57):
manner that was also used to transport slaves aboard the Juliana,
some of the women were taken as sailors, wives and
quotes for the nearly year long voyage. From the men's
point of view, it was really their right to have
a wife from one of the women for the duration
of the voyage. And it's entirely unclear, as you can
(18:19):
imagine how many of these relationships were entered into through
coercion or dress. It's not something you really keep records on. Uh.
Virtually all of the accounts we have of the journey
are from the men's points of view, and they're on
board affairs were not something that they really wrote home about. However,
these alleged wives did get preferential treatment, with more comfortable
(18:41):
places to sleep and the protection of one of the men.
So there was some advantage to this arrangement. And while
it's entirely likely that some of the women were coerced
or threatened or otherwise taken advantage of and even raped,
it is also entirely likely that some women played the
situation to their own advantage Consensually. I also want to
(19:02):
make really clear that this exact same scenario was true
on every prison transport that had women aboard, not just
on the Lady Julianna. And as many of these women
were very young and they really had no knowledge of contraception,
and the ship itself had not been outfitted with a
supply of condoms to be distributed, there were definitely babies
(19:24):
conceived along the way. The ship made a stop in
Santa Cruz to Tenerifee in the Canary Islands, which is
off the northwestern coast of Africa. On this stop, many
of the women were allowed to leave, most of them
escorted by some of the sailors. Some of them took
advantage of their time in port to do some of
the scamming and thievery that had landed them on the
(19:46):
transport in the first place. Mrs Elizabeth Barnsley was a
pickpocket and a thief who had been making a very
good living in England by stealing from upper class marks.
She had also become the de facto leader of the women.
She is older than most of them, in her wealth
and status meant that people looked up to her. In
Santa Cruz and in other ports. Men from shore visited
(20:08):
the ship, and she, seeing a lucrative opportunity, essentially became
a madam. They made other stops along the way as well,
and in one of them, in Rio de jed Narrow,
they stayed for about a month and a half, beginning
at the start of November. This is because women on
board had started to develop scurvy and several of them
(20:28):
were very eminently going to give birth. Somewhere between fifteen
and twenty babies were born while they were in Brazil,
and at that point the pregnant women mostly stayed in
a tent that they made for themselves on the deck
of the ship. Rio was more strict than the other
ports they had visited, so the convicts were mostly kept
(20:49):
aboard the ship, but there were still again men visiting
the ship from the shore. From Rio, their lady Julietta
went to Cape Town, South Africa, and then finally to
Sydney Cove. They arrived on June third, and their voyage
had taken almost a year. At this point, the first
(21:11):
fleet human cargo had already been there on the continent
of Australia for about two and a half years, and
uh they did not give the women from the Lady
Juliana a warm welcome. We will talk about why after
a brief word from a sponsor so to return to
the Lady Julianna's passengers. Before the female convicts left the
(21:35):
Lady Julianna, they all donned their best dresses, which had
been brought up from the hold for them to put
on for the occasion. They saw to each other's hair
and nails, and brows and their teeth. They were also
in overall better health than a lot of them had
been uh when they left for London. There were two
(21:56):
hundred and twenty two of them and a number of babies. However,
the colony at Sydney Cove did not want women. What
they wanted was food and supplies, and things had not
improved since they had arrived there. They've been strictly rationing food,
and their infirmary had been wiped pretty much cleaned by
a smallpox outbreak. So instead of the food and supplies
(22:20):
and and medical equipment that they desperately needed, what they
got were more mouths to feed, and they were not
even mouths that would be expected to earn their keep
by hard manual labor. That the colony also desperately needed.
On top of that, these women who had been intended
to provide emotional ties to transported men that were already
(22:43):
in Australia, they instead now had emotional ties to the
sailors above aboard the Lady Juliana. They had been in
close quarters together for almost a year, and some of
them had children together. When the time came for the
Lady Juliana to depart, some women refused to leave, or
else they are men threatened to break their contracts and
stay in Australia. Some of the sailors even married there
(23:05):
on board wives for real on shore. Fortunately, more of
the second fleet, which had been just hugely delayed in
leaving Europe, which is how they managed to get to
Australia at about the same time as a ship that
had taken way way way longer than normal. Other ships
arrived about eighteen days behind the Lady Julianna, and these
(23:27):
ships brought more convicts as well. There had been one
thousand and seventeen of them aboard when they left Britain,
and seven hundred fifty nine of them had survived. However,
one of the two storeships that had been along with
the rest of the second fleet, did wreck during the journey,
so those provisions had had been lost that they did
(23:49):
have more labor, more supplies that showed up a couple
of weeks after the Lady Julianna got there, and while
this did smooth things over, the surprise one of the
other second Fleet ships wound up taking about one hundred
and fifty of the Lady Juliana's female convicts north to
Norfolk Island, which was another of Britain's Australian colonies, rather
(24:13):
than having them stay in Sydney Cove. So that's how
they tried to address the gender imbalance a little bit.
It was not really successful. Representatives of the British government
in Australia did everything they could think of to encourage
people to get married. They really thought this was extremely important,
and apart from requesting this shipment of specifically female convicts,
(24:36):
they also decided that married men would get extra land,
so they would get fifty acres plus ten more acres
for every child they had, while unmarried men would only
get thirty. However, the marriagery in Australia continued to be
quite low overall for many years, and the imbalance between
the sexes lasted a long time. There were still more
(24:58):
European men than women in austra Alia for something like
a century, and convicts also outnumbered free settlers until the
eighteen thirties. All but about twenty five of the women
who went to Australia aboard the Lady Juliana wound up
staying in Australia for the rest of their lives. Some
of them did marry and went on to be wives
(25:19):
and mothers, and others once their sentence was up, started
enterprises of their own and became the owners of pubs
and ranches and other businesses. One in particular, Mary Wade,
who was the young girl that was sentenced to death
at age eleven for stealing another girl's clothes, is reported
to have had three hundred living descendants when she died.
(25:41):
We've gotten a couple of requests to do a podcast
specifically about her, just because the story of arriving on
a prison transport and then having reportedly three hundred living
descendants is pretty amazing. People call her sometimes the Mother
of Australia, which sort of overlooks that there were already
plenty of people in Australia before she had her three
(26:02):
descendants descendants. Later on, Convict transports for women also became
much more regimented, with the women having strictly supervised schedules
that included cleaning, meals and work um like the soone
shirts that the women on the Lady Julianna did, except
in the Lady Julianna's case, those materials had come from
(26:22):
the captain and had not really been an official part
of the government strategy. This presumably cut down on the
sort of quote floating brothel nature of what had happened
on the Julianna, and maybe also on the liaisons between
the women and the crew. One of my resources for
(26:43):
this episode was a book called The Floating Brothel, which
tells the stories, like the more human stories of a
bunch of the individual women who were on the ship.
It goes into a lot more detail about specifically with
their lives are like before and what their lives are
like after. There's one story about this, uh, this woman
(27:04):
who one of the crew who went on to write
a memoir about his experience. He basically just fell in
love with her right from the beginning while they were
still docked on the Thames, and they had this whole
relationship that lasted the whole journey and they had a
baby together and uh, he then he had to leave.
(27:25):
You know, his duty was to go back with his
ship to continue on with its mission, which from there
was to to continue I think into the tea trade
after it had dropped off all the prisoners, um. And
they had this whole heart wrenching goodbye where she was
going to wait for him and he was going to
try to come back from her, and he for her,
and he even tried to get out of his contract
so he could just stay with her in Australia. UM.
(27:46):
And then he left and then she married another guy
the next day the next day. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway,
there are lots of very human stories and some of
them are touching. Some of them are really definitely disturbing,
and uh, the whole idea of okay, we need to
(28:09):
specifically send female prisoners, some of whom were sentenced for
just really minor crimes like that part is really disturbing. UM.
And at the same time, there are some pretty captivating, uh,
individual experiences in that whole setting, which kind of surprised me. Yeah.
(28:31):
I mean, it's it's so funny to think about how
strict sort of the the penal system was when you
could be sentenced to death for really mine. You know,
not to say that stealing closes something good to do,
but it's certainly bad. But it seems like an extreme
case to sentence something like that to death, or even
to put someone on a ship for a multi month journey,
(28:53):
to send them away from the country for probably the
rest of their lives. Um. You know, whenever I'm reser
saying an article or a podcast, I often sort of
recap for Patrick what it's about, and often he has
these responses that are similar to my responses as I
have been doing the research. And so I had told
(29:15):
him that, you know, that it was the ship, and
it was full of women who were being sent to
populate Australia, specifically with women prisoners because there were too
many men prisoners, um. And that a lot of the
people who were sent were teenagers who had basically shoplifted something.
A lot of them had shoplifted fabric or a spoon
or you know, needles and thread and ribbons, like a
(29:36):
lot of it was the shoplifting of basic things that
you needed for life. And Patrick was like, that seems
really excessive, And I said well, you know, there is
a reason that in the Constitution we have things about
cruel and unusual punishment, like it was a response to
some of the things that now today seemed very cruel
(29:58):
and unusual. Uh. And on that note, I have listener mail.
That's alright. What's listener mail? Is from Brian and Ryan
says Hi, Tracy and Holly. This is Ryan. I'm one
of the people who made a was England at War
with France? Website? Those are they still delight me? They're
so charming And yes, Coog made us websites to tell
(30:20):
us whether England was at where with France. Anyway, I'm
writing in about your recent Greatly Forward episode. A couple
of years ago, I spent six months studying abroad in Beijing,
where I took courses in Chinese history, art, and culture,
among other things. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited
about your People's Republic of China mini series. You guys
didn't mention a small detail that I personally think it's
(30:41):
important to understand part of why the Great Leap Forward
failed when government officials greatly overestimated crop and production yields.
You mentioned they did so for a couple of reasons.
Saving face and helping others do the same as a
big part of Chinese culture, and to admit that yields
were less than expected to now and his government would
not only make mall lose face, but also the officials themselves,
(31:02):
so they thought it better to overestimate. The other reason
was fear of prosecution. You mentioned that dissenters were heavily punished,
and those people in charge of making sure yields were high.
We're afraid that if their superiors found out that they
had failed to do their jobs, they would be persecuted
and lose their jobs as well. I'm not sure if
you just didn't know these details or if you left
them out intentionally, but I thought i'd write in and
(31:23):
tell you about them all the same as always, keep
up the excellent work and have a great week, Ryan,
So thank you Ryan for writing UM. I don't think
we specifically used the term saving face in either of
our episodes that relate to the Great Leap Forward UM,
which at the point of getting this email, only one
(31:43):
of them had come out, so Ryan had not heard
the next one yet when he wrote into this, so
I don't think we specifically talked about the idea of
saving face um, which is an important part of it.
But we did uh talk quite a bit about people
being afraid of retribution, and some of that does um
in the episode about the Great Famine, more so than
(32:04):
in the episode about the Great Leap Forward, so UM,
just because it is an important piece of it that
I don't think we specifically use that term. I wanted
to read Ryan's letter to that and to remind everybody
that there are now some websites on the Internet where
you can find out whether England and France were at
war in a particular year, which I find to be delightful.
(32:27):
So if you would like to write to U s,
you can. We're at History Podcasts at how stuff Works
dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history.
Are tumbler is miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed
in history. If you would like to learn about one
of the uglier facets of what we talked about today,
(32:49):
you can come to our website. Put the word brothel
in the search bar and you will find the article
how human trafficking works. Uh. There are parts of the
story that do you sort of seem more like a
human trafficking uh element than you know, a conscious and
consenting decision made by the people who are involved. So
(33:12):
you can do that at our website, which is how
stuff Works dot com. And you can also come to
our show website which is missed in History dot com.
You can get show notes, you can get all of
the episodes in one archive, and a thing I have
not mentioned as we also have a store now which
is it missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com, So
(33:32):
you can find out all kinds of awesome information and
here every episode at how stuff works dot com and
missed in History dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome. I'm Tracy Wilson
and I'm Holly Frying. And today's episode I did not
mean to be a weird counterpoint to our episode on
(00:23):
the King's Daughters for the Fia du Bloch, but it is.
It's a weird counterpart to that episode. That was the
episode where uh, they needed more women in the new
colonies in Canada and so they rounded them up and
sent them there. This is sort of the same story,
(00:44):
but the women were not going voluntarily because they were
in fact prisoners. They were convicts. So, as we probably
all know, Great Britain used to use the continent of
Australia as a pane colony and consequently the first European
resident of Australia were mostly male and mostly criminals, and
(01:04):
really unsurprisingly this caused quite a lot of problems, and
the people in charge decided pretty much immediately, as in
before the first ships of the first Fleet turned around
to go back to England, that they needed to do
something about it. And that's where the transport ship known
as the Lady Juliana comes in. And while the King's
(01:27):
daughters worked pretty well as a plan. This plan did
not work quite as well. And in case it's not
clear from the title of this podcast, today's episode is
gonna include some pretty candid discussion of prostitution as well
as some aspects that may be disturbing to people. There
(01:49):
are some things that went on with these women that
were somewhere on the line between coerced and non consenting.
So just we get letters sometimes from parents who asks,
who asked why we did not give them a heads up.
So here is your heads up, parents and teachers. There
(02:09):
is some more adult content in this younger historians, maybe
not for them or if you're just really sensitive to
those kind of topics. Right, And it's also this is
a listener request from listener Connie, and it sounded in
the request a little more like a fun party time
than it actually is. Yes, So, in case you did
(02:30):
not know, Great Britain actually had a few reasons to
want to colonize Australia, which at the time was referred
to as New South Wales. And this was towards the
end of the seventeen hundreds, and a big reason was
to relieve the overcrowding in the prisons that were in Britain.
In the late eighteenth century, Britain's prison system was strained
to the breaking point thanks to a population boom. There
(02:51):
was also widespread poverty and a penal code that was
so strict that reformers called it quote the bloody Code.
The number of capital offenses on the books during this
period had quadrupled, and people were being sentenced to death
for crimes that, to today's eyes seemed extremely minor. It
also didn't help that the trial process was really skewed
(03:13):
in favor of the prosecution. Usually everything happened so quickly
that often the defendant did not even know it was
their turn yet, and they had already been at least
found guilty, if not also sentenced. And Great Britain had
before the Revolutionary War been using the American colonies to
offload prisoners, ultimately transporting fifty thousand prisoners to the colonies
(03:37):
before the war ended, but once the United States became independent,
that option was no longer available to Great Britain. And
just because people send us pedantic emails about this all
the time, at some points during that history Great in
Britain with Great Britain was not Great Britain yet it
was just England. Yeah, but it became great Britain during
the window. Please do not send us the then diagram anymore. Um.
(04:03):
Penal colonies also had another purpose besides just serving as prisons.
A transportation sentence was basically involuntary relocation and involuntary servitude.
The prisoners provided forced labor for British colonial interests for
the terms of their sentence, which was usually seven or
fourteen years, or sometimes for the rest of their lives.
(04:25):
Prisoner transportation also provided a long term population for the colony.
While people technically could return home once they'd finished their sentence,
it was really taken for granted that almost all of
them would stay and no one would be coming back.
So once you served your time, you'd have to save
up enough money to actually afford your passage back. That
(04:46):
was not an automatic trip, uh And even if you
could save up the money to make the voyage, you'd
have to endure an uncomfortable multi month trip to get
back to Europe. And of course people who had started
families while they were transported would either have to pay
or relocate them as well, or they would have to
leave them behind. A reason for colonizing Australia specifically was
(05:09):
so that Great Britain could build up its naval presence
in that part of the Pacific and expand its empire.
So on May thirteenth of seventeen eighty seven, a fleet
of eleven ships left Portsmouth, England, bound for Australia, and
this fleet became known as the First Fleet, and it
included six convict transports and three storeships. They were accompanied
(05:32):
by two escort ships from the Royal Navy. The convicts
aboard the transports included about five hundred seventy men and
a hundred sixty women, and in terms of the total
number of passengers who were going to stay in Australia
once the ships went back to Europe, there were two
hundred and forty two women and about eleven hundred men,
as well as some children. The First Fleet arrived in
(05:55):
January of sev and started a colony at Sydney Cove
and Jackson. Sydney Cove, which later became the City of Sydney,
became the first permanent European settlement in Australia. Meanwhile, Australia's
Aboriginal population at this point was estimated to number somewhere
between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand.
(06:18):
Things went really badly at Sydney Cove basically immediately. People
were really exhausted and sick following the months long voyage
to get there, and most of the prisoners had little
to no experience in any of the skills that were
actually needed to keep a colony running. On top of that,
the soil was not right for the crops. It could
(06:39):
have been improved with animal manure, but most of the
animals that they had brought with them had died during
the voyage. They had also bought seeds to plant in
Cape Town, South Africa, and those had wound up germinating
in the hold of the ships, so they couldn't even
be planted once they got to Australia, and the vast
disparity of the sexes was causing real problems. There were
(07:02):
reports of sexual assaults, both of Aboriginal women in the
area and the female convicts who had been transported, and
it was obvious to the people running the colony that
it was not going to survive without women. Without family ties,
men were as likely as not to leave the colony
and strike out on their own once their sentences were served.
Governor Arthur Philip was also quite worried about the morality
(07:25):
and the relationships of the convicts under his charge, and
on February seventh, so not long at all after they arrived,
he gave this address um and, as it was recounted
in the seventeen eighty nine Voyages of Governor Philip to
Botany Bay quote he particularly noticed the illegal intercourse between
(07:46):
the sexes as an offense to which encouraged a general
profligacy of manners, and it was in several ways injurious
to society. To prevent this, he strongly recommended marriage, and
promised every kind of countenance and assistance to those who,
by entering into that state, should manifest their willingness to
(08:07):
conform to the laws of morality and religion. Governor Philip
concluded his address by declaring his earnest desire to promote
the happiness of all who were under his government, and
to render the settlement in New South Wales advantageous and
honorable to his country, and fourteen marriages did actually take
place the following week. However, the vast imbalance between the
(08:31):
number of men and the number of women meant that
getting married wasn't really just an option available for the
vast majority of the male convicts, and one of the
first dispatches he wrote back to Britain Governor Philip said
quite clearly got that quote. The very small proportion of
females makes the sending out of an additional number absolutely
(08:51):
necessary and this led to a plan that involved loading
a ship specifically with female convicts of child bearing age
to then to Australia to become wives. Before we talk
about exactly how they did this and who they filled
the ships with, let's take a brief moment for a
word from a sponsor stupendous, so to get back to
(09:12):
the Lady Julianna, which was also sometimes called the Lady
Julian and how they filled her with passengers. Once word
arrived in London that the penal colony in Australia needed
women prisoners, officials got to work finding ones who would suit.
They were going to be sent to Australia aboard the
second fleet of prison transports. And while there were enough
(09:35):
total women in London's prisons to do the job, many
of them were actually too old or in one way
or another not desirable as a wife. The search for
female prisoners of the right age wound up ranging all
over the country and it actually took five months to
find enough ladies. As the search was ongoing, the women
(09:55):
who had already been selected for transport had to wait
on board a prison ship, Lady Juliana, which was at
anchor in the Thames River. Some of them had to
wait in the hold of the ship for weeks or
months before it set sail, and none of them were
allowed out on the deck until the ship was at sea.
And this was like really a foul experience obviously, I
(10:17):
mean there were any imagined. Yeah, they were packed into
these type quarters in the ship. The ship's ballast was
made of this combination of sand and gravel, and where
it was located under the ship meant that it like
just soaked up everything fetted and could never be cleaned.
So the whole experience was very gross. It sounds just lurid.
(10:39):
Uh So some of these women that were in live
dealing with these conditions were those that have been sentenced
to death, but their sentences were commuted to transportation, and
these are some of them. Uh. Mary Burgess, who was
convicted for stealing a pair of sheets and a ta
chest containing money. Mary Carter had been sentenced to death
(11:01):
for three counts of shoplifting. Sarah Cowten had been sentenced
for assault and highway robbery. Elizabeth Emmons had also been
sentenced to death for three counts of shoplifting. Catherine Hayland
who was found guilty of counterfeiting coins and her sentence
(11:22):
was actually to be burned at the stake. It's also
Mary Coimes who had shoplifted thirty yards of printed linen,
and Mary Wade and Jane Whiting who had both been
convicted of highway robbery. So about these highway robberies, that
makes it sound like some women on horseback brandishing swords
(11:45):
came running up upon a carriage and and stole everything
from everyone inside by force. Right, That is not what happened.
That is the image that gets conjured. I think. So
Mary Wade and Jane Whiting, who were tried together because
they had committed the together. To quote from the records
at Old Bailey, which was where they were tried. Mary
(12:05):
Wade and Jane Whiting were indicted for foloniously assaulting Mary
Phillips on the King's Highway on the fifth of October
and putting her in fear and foloniously taking from her
person and against her will, one cotton frock, one linen tippet,
one linen cap, the property of John Forward when it
(12:26):
also gave the values of each of those things, which
were not much. So basically what they had done these
were children. They had locked another child into an outhouse
and stolen her clothes from her, and for this they
were both sentenced to death. They also severe penalty. Yeah.
They also they pawned those clothes for eighteen pence, So
(12:48):
that gives you an idea of how much this was
actually worth. And this is sort of where the information
gets a little bit startling. Uh. Mary Wade was the
youngest person aboard the Lady Juliana, and when she was tried,
she was only eleven years old. So these really were
just children, Yeah they were. They were definitely the youngest ones,
(13:09):
but a lot of the women on board were teenagers,
definitely um and not everyone viewed having their sentences commuted
as a mercy. Katholic Katherine Hayland, for example, she was
the one who was supposed to be burned at the stake.
She was one of a whole group of women who
were supposed to be executed, and they were all at
the same time offered to have their sentences commuted to transportation,
(13:31):
either for seven years or for life, and Katherine and
fifteen of the others agreed, but six of them said no,
some of them because they said they were innocent and
they were not going to make any concessions because they
weren't guilty in the first place, and others really believed
that transportation was a fate worse than death. I mean,
(13:52):
at this point there had essentially been one ship full
of prisoner or one fleet of ships full of prisoners
that had gone to Australia. It there was not really
a town there yet that people would be living in.
There were definitely Aboriginal peoples with their own societies and
their own culture, but the British viewed them with a
lot of fear and suspicion. Um so there were people
(14:13):
who would basically rather die than go there. And so
all six of these women who had refused were given
twenty four hours to think about it, after which they
refused again. And then it was only after days of
being kept on bread and water as punishment that most
of them begrudgingly changed their minds and agreed to go
to Australia. Um. There I think there was one who insisted, no,
(14:37):
you're just gonna have to hang me. I'm not gonna
do it. You can't make me. Yeah, And I'm sure
in their minds to some degree it was like a
thing where they were perceiving like, Okay, I can go
on this possibly likely horrible journey and die slow and miserable,
or I can be put to death relatively quickly. Right.
That was probably how they were weighing that out. It
(14:59):
wasn't so much that there weren't creature comforts there, but
that it looked like a pretty horrible end to come to. Yes. Uh.
Most of the women that were sent aboard the Lady Juliana, though,
were sentenced to transportation from the outset. It was not
a case of a reduced sentence. So some examples of
the women and crimes that got them uh sentenced to
(15:21):
transportation included Jane Wieldon, who was sentenced for stealing a
silk handkerchief from a shop. Mary Winspear had been sentenced
to transportation for stealing three men's hats, Rosamund Dale for
stealing goods with a value of five pounds, and Sarah
Acton for stealing ten live suckling pigs. Some of the
(15:44):
women who were brought aboard the Lady Juliana for transport
also had their babies with them, children that have been
born during imprisonment, and some of these women's husbands were
also on second fleet transport on one of the ships
carrying men and the end a second fleet wound up
with four prison transport ships and two store ships. The
other three transport ships mostly carried men, and on the
(16:08):
Lady Julianna. As we said before, all of the prisoners
were women. The Lady Julianna left on July twenty nine nine,
and they were roughly two hundred and forty five women aboard,
but their records are actually pretty sketchy. There are women
known to have escaped before the ship departed who were
never stricken from the manifest, and there were others that
(16:30):
were known to be aboard that were never added to
the manifest in the first place. Even though the whole
experience was pretty filthy and foul, the conditions on the
Lady Julianna were much better than on the other prison transports.
The women were allowed up on deck For the most part,
they had enough food to eat and water to drink.
They also had a surgeon on board to see to
(16:52):
their medical needs, and they were supplied with cloth and
needles and threads to make shirts, which would then be
sold when they got support. The other ships were an
entirely different matter. From a letter from w Hill to
Jonathan Waltham Esquire written in July, quote, the irons used
(17:13):
upon these unhappy wretches were barbarous. The contractors had been
in the Guinea trade and had put on board the
same shackles used by them in that trade, which are
made with a short bolt instead of chains, that dropped
between the legs and fastened with a bandage about the waist,
like those at the different galals. Those bolts were not
more than three quarters of a foot in length, so
(17:34):
that they could not extend either leg from the other
more than an inch or two at most. Thus fettered,
it was impossible for them to move, but at the
risk of both their legs being broken. So if you
are not familiar with the term guinea trade and haven't
put that together from contacts, he's basically saying this is
a slaving ship, but as transporting these prisoners and the
(17:57):
manner that was also used to transport slaves aboard the Juliana,
some of the women were taken as sailors, wives and
quotes for the nearly year long voyage. From the men's
point of view, it was really their right to have
a wife from one of the women for the duration
of the voyage. And it's entirely unclear, as you can
(18:19):
imagine how many of these relationships were entered into through
coercion or dress. It's not something you really keep records on. Uh.
Virtually all of the accounts we have of the journey
are from the men's points of view, and they're on
board affairs were not something that they really wrote home about. However,
these alleged wives did get preferential treatment, with more comfortable
(18:41):
places to sleep and the protection of one of the men.
So there was some advantage to this arrangement. And while
it's entirely likely that some of the women were coerced
or threatened or otherwise taken advantage of and even raped,
it is also entirely likely that some women played the
situation to their own advantage Consensually. I also want to
(19:02):
make really clear that this exact same scenario was true
on every prison transport that had women aboard, not just
on the Lady Julianna. And as many of these women
were very young and they really had no knowledge of contraception,
and the ship itself had not been outfitted with a
supply of condoms to be distributed, there were definitely babies
(19:24):
conceived along the way. The ship made a stop in
Santa Cruz to Tenerifee in the Canary Islands, which is
off the northwestern coast of Africa. On this stop, many
of the women were allowed to leave, most of them
escorted by some of the sailors. Some of them took
advantage of their time in port to do some of
the scamming and thievery that had landed them on the
(19:46):
transport in the first place. Mrs Elizabeth Barnsley was a
pickpocket and a thief who had been making a very
good living in England by stealing from upper class marks.
She had also become the de facto leader of the women.
She is older than most of them, in her wealth
and status meant that people looked up to her. In
Santa Cruz and in other ports. Men from shore visited
(20:08):
the ship, and she, seeing a lucrative opportunity, essentially became
a madam. They made other stops along the way as well,
and in one of them, in Rio de jed Narrow,
they stayed for about a month and a half, beginning
at the start of November. This is because women on
board had started to develop scurvy and several of them
(20:28):
were very eminently going to give birth. Somewhere between fifteen
and twenty babies were born while they were in Brazil,
and at that point the pregnant women mostly stayed in
a tent that they made for themselves on the deck
of the ship. Rio was more strict than the other
ports they had visited, so the convicts were mostly kept
(20:49):
aboard the ship, but there were still again men visiting
the ship from the shore. From Rio, their lady Julietta
went to Cape Town, South Africa, and then finally to
Sydney Cove. They arrived on June third, and their voyage
had taken almost a year. At this point, the first
(21:11):
fleet human cargo had already been there on the continent
of Australia for about two and a half years, and
uh they did not give the women from the Lady
Juliana a warm welcome. We will talk about why after
a brief word from a sponsor so to return to
the Lady Julianna's passengers. Before the female convicts left the
(21:35):
Lady Julianna, they all donned their best dresses, which had
been brought up from the hold for them to put
on for the occasion. They saw to each other's hair
and nails, and brows and their teeth. They were also
in overall better health than a lot of them had
been uh when they left for London. There were two
(21:56):
hundred and twenty two of them and a number of babies. However,
the colony at Sydney Cove did not want women. What
they wanted was food and supplies, and things had not
improved since they had arrived there. They've been strictly rationing food,
and their infirmary had been wiped pretty much cleaned by
a smallpox outbreak. So instead of the food and supplies
(22:20):
and and medical equipment that they desperately needed, what they
got were more mouths to feed, and they were not
even mouths that would be expected to earn their keep
by hard manual labor. That the colony also desperately needed.
On top of that, these women who had been intended
to provide emotional ties to transported men that were already
(22:43):
in Australia, they instead now had emotional ties to the
sailors above aboard the Lady Juliana. They had been in
close quarters together for almost a year, and some of
them had children together. When the time came for the
Lady Juliana to depart, some women refused to leave, or
else they are men threatened to break their contracts and
stay in Australia. Some of the sailors even married there
(23:05):
on board wives for real on shore. Fortunately, more of
the second fleet, which had been just hugely delayed in
leaving Europe, which is how they managed to get to
Australia at about the same time as a ship that
had taken way way way longer than normal. Other ships
arrived about eighteen days behind the Lady Julianna, and these
(23:27):
ships brought more convicts as well. There had been one
thousand and seventeen of them aboard when they left Britain,
and seven hundred fifty nine of them had survived. However,
one of the two storeships that had been along with
the rest of the second fleet, did wreck during the journey,
so those provisions had had been lost that they did
(23:49):
have more labor, more supplies that showed up a couple
of weeks after the Lady Julianna got there, and while
this did smooth things over, the surprise one of the
other second Fleet ships wound up taking about one hundred
and fifty of the Lady Juliana's female convicts north to
Norfolk Island, which was another of Britain's Australian colonies, rather
(24:13):
than having them stay in Sydney Cove. So that's how
they tried to address the gender imbalance a little bit.
It was not really successful. Representatives of the British government
in Australia did everything they could think of to encourage
people to get married. They really thought this was extremely important,
and apart from requesting this shipment of specifically female convicts,
(24:36):
they also decided that married men would get extra land,
so they would get fifty acres plus ten more acres
for every child they had, while unmarried men would only
get thirty. However, the marriagery in Australia continued to be
quite low overall for many years, and the imbalance between
the sexes lasted a long time. There were still more
(24:58):
European men than women in austra Alia for something like
a century, and convicts also outnumbered free settlers until the
eighteen thirties. All but about twenty five of the women
who went to Australia aboard the Lady Juliana wound up
staying in Australia for the rest of their lives. Some
of them did marry and went on to be wives
(25:19):
and mothers, and others once their sentence was up, started
enterprises of their own and became the owners of pubs
and ranches and other businesses. One in particular, Mary Wade,
who was the young girl that was sentenced to death
at age eleven for stealing another girl's clothes, is reported
to have had three hundred living descendants when she died.
(25:41):
We've gotten a couple of requests to do a podcast
specifically about her, just because the story of arriving on
a prison transport and then having reportedly three hundred living
descendants is pretty amazing. People call her sometimes the Mother
of Australia, which sort of overlooks that there were already
plenty of people in Australia before she had her three
(26:02):
descendants descendants. Later on, Convict transports for women also became
much more regimented, with the women having strictly supervised schedules
that included cleaning, meals and work um like the soone
shirts that the women on the Lady Julianna did, except
in the Lady Julianna's case, those materials had come from
(26:22):
the captain and had not really been an official part
of the government strategy. This presumably cut down on the
sort of quote floating brothel nature of what had happened
on the Julianna, and maybe also on the liaisons between
the women and the crew. One of my resources for
(26:43):
this episode was a book called The Floating Brothel, which
tells the stories, like the more human stories of a
bunch of the individual women who were on the ship.
It goes into a lot more detail about specifically with
their lives are like before and what their lives are
like after. There's one story about this, uh, this woman
(27:04):
who one of the crew who went on to write
a memoir about his experience. He basically just fell in
love with her right from the beginning while they were
still docked on the Thames, and they had this whole
relationship that lasted the whole journey and they had a
baby together and uh, he then he had to leave.
(27:25):
You know, his duty was to go back with his
ship to continue on with its mission, which from there
was to to continue I think into the tea trade
after it had dropped off all the prisoners, um. And
they had this whole heart wrenching goodbye where she was
going to wait for him and he was going to
try to come back from her, and he for her,
and he even tried to get out of his contract
so he could just stay with her in Australia. UM.
(27:46):
And then he left and then she married another guy
the next day the next day. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway,
there are lots of very human stories and some of
them are touching. Some of them are really definitely disturbing,
and uh, the whole idea of okay, we need to
(28:09):
specifically send female prisoners, some of whom were sentenced for
just really minor crimes like that part is really disturbing. UM.
And at the same time, there are some pretty captivating, uh,
individual experiences in that whole setting, which kind of surprised me. Yeah.
(28:31):
I mean, it's it's so funny to think about how
strict sort of the the penal system was when you
could be sentenced to death for really mine. You know,
not to say that stealing closes something good to do,
but it's certainly bad. But it seems like an extreme
case to sentence something like that to death, or even
to put someone on a ship for a multi month journey,
(28:53):
to send them away from the country for probably the
rest of their lives. Um. You know, whenever I'm reser
saying an article or a podcast, I often sort of
recap for Patrick what it's about, and often he has
these responses that are similar to my responses as I
have been doing the research. And so I had told
(29:15):
him that, you know, that it was the ship, and
it was full of women who were being sent to
populate Australia, specifically with women prisoners because there were too
many men prisoners, um. And that a lot of the
people who were sent were teenagers who had basically shoplifted something.
A lot of them had shoplifted fabric or a spoon
or you know, needles and thread and ribbons, like a
(29:36):
lot of it was the shoplifting of basic things that
you needed for life. And Patrick was like, that seems
really excessive, And I said well, you know, there is
a reason that in the Constitution we have things about
cruel and unusual punishment, like it was a response to
some of the things that now today seemed very cruel
(29:58):
and unusual. Uh. And on that note, I have listener mail.
That's alright. What's listener mail? Is from Brian and Ryan
says Hi, Tracy and Holly. This is Ryan. I'm one
of the people who made a was England at War
with France? Website? Those are they still delight me? They're
so charming And yes, Coog made us websites to tell
(30:20):
us whether England was at where with France. Anyway, I'm
writing in about your recent Greatly Forward episode. A couple
of years ago, I spent six months studying abroad in Beijing,
where I took courses in Chinese history, art, and culture,
among other things. So needless to say, I'm pretty excited
about your People's Republic of China mini series. You guys
didn't mention a small detail that I personally think it's
(30:41):
important to understand part of why the Great Leap Forward
failed when government officials greatly overestimated crop and production yields.
You mentioned they did so for a couple of reasons.
Saving face and helping others do the same as a
big part of Chinese culture, and to admit that yields
were less than expected to now and his government would
not only make mall lose face, but also the officials themselves,
(31:02):
so they thought it better to overestimate. The other reason
was fear of prosecution. You mentioned that dissenters were heavily punished,
and those people in charge of making sure yields were high.
We're afraid that if their superiors found out that they
had failed to do their jobs, they would be persecuted
and lose their jobs as well. I'm not sure if
you just didn't know these details or if you left
them out intentionally, but I thought i'd write in and
(31:23):
tell you about them all the same as always, keep
up the excellent work and have a great week, Ryan,
So thank you Ryan for writing UM. I don't think
we specifically used the term saving face in either of
our episodes that relate to the Great Leap Forward UM,
which at the point of getting this email, only one
(31:43):
of them had come out, so Ryan had not heard
the next one yet when he wrote into this, so
I don't think we specifically talked about the idea of
saving face um, which is an important part of it.
But we did uh talk quite a bit about people
being afraid of retribution, and some of that does um
in the episode about the Great Famine, more so than
(32:04):
in the episode about the Great Leap Forward, so UM,
just because it is an important piece of it that
I don't think we specifically use that term. I wanted
to read Ryan's letter to that and to remind everybody
that there are now some websites on the Internet where
you can find out whether England and France were at
war in a particular year, which I find to be delightful.
(32:27):
So if you would like to write to U s,
you can. We're at History Podcasts at how stuff Works
dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook dot com
slash miss in history and on Twitter at miss in history.
Are tumbler is miss in history dot tumbler dot com,
and we're on Pinterest at pinterest dot com slash missed
in history. If you would like to learn about one
of the uglier facets of what we talked about today,
(32:49):
you can come to our website. Put the word brothel
in the search bar and you will find the article
how human trafficking works. Uh. There are parts of the
story that do you sort of seem more like a
human trafficking uh element than you know, a conscious and
consenting decision made by the people who are involved. So
(33:12):
you can do that at our website, which is how
stuff Works dot com. And you can also come to
our show website which is missed in History dot com.
You can get show notes, you can get all of
the episodes in one archive, and a thing I have
not mentioned as we also have a store now which
is it missed in History dot spreadshirt dot com, So
(33:32):
you can find out all kinds of awesome information and
here every episode at how stuff works dot com and
missed in History dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, is it how stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.