Page 8. Matthias, one of 1,200 convicts sent to Australia from Lincolnshire, would have been sent off to one of the many disease-ridden hulks to await transportation. Fortunately he didn’t have to wait too long to be transported and left from London on the ship "Woodbridge" on 16 October 1839.

The journey took 133 days. Only one death occurred on board and 229 of the 230 male convicts arrived in New South Wales. The ship’s Master was W Dobson and George S Moxey was the ship’s Surgeon. Against scurvy Dr Moxey had ordained that the convicts should get a daily dose of lime juice, sugar and vinegar. For a bonus, they received a nightly half-pint of port wine to keep their spirits up. This was considered a great luxury. The convict diarist Charles Cozens traveled on board the Woodbridge in 1840 and recorded that its distribution was a ritual:

• "For the purpose of exercising the men, and as preventive to disease, each man entered at one door on the quarter-deck, danced to the cask, drank his allowance, and then danced off again, round by the opposite doorway, the steps, as various as the performers, formed altogether a most amusing 'ballet'.

The Woodbridge arrived in New South Wales on 27 February 1840, only a year after the crime of fowl-stealing was committed. Meanwhile, native-born Australians had come to hate the stigma of convictry - and the competition from assigned convict labor. In 1840, all transportation to New South Wales ceased.

We will continue with the story of his family in England but we will return to Matthias in due course to see what happened to him after his arrival in Australia.

Interior of Convict Hulk "Warrior" circa 1840.

Convict Hulk "Warrior"