On 15 March 1817 the convict ship the Chapman departed from the Cork with 200 male convicts on board. When it dropped anchor off Sydney Cove on four months later its decks were blood-soaked. The prison doors opened to reveal 160 gaunt and brutalized men. Twelve were dead and twenty-eight lay wounded in the ships' hospital. Using daily journals from the crew, detailed testimony from several convict and official colonial government correspondence, this book pieces together what happened during those four months at sea and sheds new light on one of the darkest episodes in the history of penal transportation

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